Ethnographic photobomb: The materiality of decolonial image manipulation

Abstract

Indigenous photobomb memes emerged on social networks as a media practice alongside contemporary activist campaigns, where artists insert pop culture content into digitized ethnographic photographs already in use as mainstream meme fodder. This article takes a materialist approach to such memes to explore how the technical processes of digital image editing function ideologically. Meme series by Kiowa-Choctaw artist Steven Paul Judd and others illustrate how compositing methods like cloning and healing tools may disrupt ethnographic photographs’ claims to history, interrogating the aesthetic systems that underwrite settler-colonial media. As these algorithmic processes remediate the digitized image and re-situate it relative to other photoshopping practices, they bear a trace of settler digitality that allows such memes to intervene in current cultural debates and aesthetic trends. Circulation via social media generates a web of twice-remediated memes, which always refer back to their prior analog and digital iterations.