Ethnographic photobomb: The materiality of decolonial image manipulation

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.

Automated summary

The article discusses the emergence of indigenous photobomb memes on social networks and the ideological impact of digital image editing technology. Artists editing ethnographic photographs disrupt claims to history and aesthetic systems, intervening in current cultural debates and trends. Through social media circulation, these memes create a network that references prior analog and digital iterations.