Abstract
Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from memes that expand or expound the meaning of the original picture to those that narrow and potentially destroy its significance. Assessing Hariman and Lucaites’ contention that appropriations of iconic images enhance civic engagement and public culture, we argue that some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.
Keywords
Only on rare occasions do photojournalists take pictures that reach far beyond their initial audiences and become part of our national or even transnational collective memories. This is the case, for instance, with the ‘Accidental Napalm Attack’ photograph of the naked girl fleeing during the Vietnam War 1 (Figure 1), or the Chinese protestor standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, or perhaps, more recently, of the drowned Syrian refugee toddler Alan Kurdi.
Nick Ut’s ‘Accidental Napalm Attack’ photograph, 1972 (Source: AP).
These and other such pictures are considered ‘iconic’ photographs: symbolically dense images that are widely replicated and circulated, attract public attention, and give rise to public discussion (Hariman and Lucaites, 2003). Located at the juncture between the pictorial and the mnemonic ‘turns’ in recent cultural and political studies, they are privileged objects for ‘media memory’ research – ‘the systematic exploration of collective pasts that are narrated by the media, through the use of the media, and about the media’ (Neiger et al., 2011: 1).
The use of the construct ‘the media’ is telling here: iconic photographs have traditionally become culturally salient and mnemonically powerful through extensive replication and circulation by the institutions of mass media, most notably newspapers, magazines, and television; their histories can be traced through various forms of cultural and political appropriation by these institutions as time passes after their initial exposure. Key questions then arise: What happens to these images when technologies of image circulation, replication, and alteration are extended beyond the confines of traditional media and become ubiquitous among ordinary individuals? What happens to their broad significance in the age of digital ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins, 2006) and ‘networked publics’ (Benkler, 2006) when photographs can be appropriated, altered for diverse purposes and immediately ‘shared’ with vast numbers of others using Web 2.0 and social networks? What happens to their compositional coherence and historical meaning when they can be circulated as ‘algorithmic images’ (Rubinstein and Sluis, 2013) – as malleable resources for endless memetic performances – rather than as authoritative documents that anchor shared memory? In short, what becomes of iconic photographs in an era of digital memes?
Addressing these questions involves thinking through the continuities and transformations befalling iconic photographs as we shift from the 20th century mass ‘media regime’ to a more fluid digital environment whose legal, political, economic, and cultural norms are in flux (Delli Carpini and Williams, 2011). This article analyzes the significance of recycling iconic photographs across media platforms and the Internet, studying selected variations of a single original image through the mass media era to the present day. Focusing on the ‘Accidental Napalm’ photo, it examines how the initial meanings of recycled iconic photographs are revised and potentially lost and reflects on the consequences of such revisions for public deliberation.
Symbolic significance, circulation, and canonization
There is little consensus on what an iconic photograph is and most scholars approach this object inductively through a list of definitional criteria. Perlmutter (1998), for example, proposes six criteria: (a) significance of the reported event, (b) capacity to represent the event as a whole, (c) celebrity of the image promoted by the media, (d) prominence of display of the image, (e) frequent repetition of the image across media outlets, and (f) ability to generate a primordial theme in society such as good versus evil. Some criteria concern the relation of the image to its referent (a and b); others emphasize its media publicity (c, d, and e) or the public’s recognition of the image and its social significance (a, c, and f). Other scholars have accepted a number of these criteria, contested some and added yet more (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2008; Griffin, 1999; Hariman and Lucaites, 2003).
Despite the overall lack of agreement, three major traits consistently recur: (a) the recognition of these photos by a large public, (b) their repetition and recycling across media platforms, and (c) their broad social and moral significance, beyond the referential meaning of the originally reported event. In fact, these three features are mutually reinforcing: Circulation and replication facilitate public recognition of iconic photos, while the assumption that these photos will be recognized encourages their intertextual recycling. They are recognized and reproduced because they are endowed with extensive social and moral meaning, but the range and scope of their interpretations also expand as a consequence of their reuse in new contexts. For instance, examining the case of the 1989 ‘Tank Man’ image of the protester facing tanks in Tiananmen Square, Lee et al. (2011) show how ‘the media have extracted and abstracted Tiananmen from its original context to symbolize complex, contradictory, and generalized layers of meanings’ about China (p. 336). More specifically, while for the American press Tiananmen initially symbolized Communist dictatorship, it became the symbol of China’s violation of human rights later in the 1990s, and its significance faded away in the 2000s, although ‘it remained as part of United States’ ritualistic memory of China’s repression that invokes the moral bottom line of US foreign policy’ (p. 335).
By granting the original event broader moral and emotional meaning, these photos can also give birth to new events. ‘Accidental Napalm’ is not merely an illustration of one particular accident among the many tragic incidents of the Vietnam War: its publication became an event in its own right, contributing to a series of other events, including protests against that war, but also against other wars, as well as other suffering and injustice (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007; for a nuanced account, see Westwell, 2011).
These emphases on iconic recycling as a dynamic, generative force have led to uses of the term ‘icon’ beyond its primary association with visual media. 2 Bennett and Lawrence (1995), for example, use the term ‘news icons’ to describe ‘images’ – both overtly visual and also verbal ‘word-pictures’ – that emerge ‘when an ongoing news story is crystalized into a dramatic event’ (p. 23). Like iconic photographs, news icons are recycled and inserted into other news narratives, as they ‘not only dominate the events within which they originate but are used by journalists to evoke larger cultural themes, symbolizing values, contradictions, or changes that have begun to surface in society’ (p. 23). More recently, Sonnevend (2016) has shown how the Western journalistic account of ‘the fall of the Berlin Wall’ is an almost myth-like condensation of a chaotic sequence of occurrences. Crucially, the ‘fall of the wall’ has since been turned into a ‘global iconic event’ through diverse aesthetic practices of recycling – textual, visual, and even architectural; these have shaped accounts of subsequent separation walls and fences in other contexts.
Such broadenings of the concept of the icon intersect with contemporary theorizations of ‘iconic power’ (Alexander et al., 2012) that connect aesthetic form and sociopolitical influence. Alexander (2010) defines icons as ‘symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shaping’ (p. 10). The materiality of icons converts abstract ideas into sensory experiences, enabling them to ‘concentrate and direct emotions’ and convey moral values in powerful ways (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007: 36). Alexander (2010) goes so far as to postulate an ‘iconic consciousness’ which ‘occurs when an aesthetically shaped materiality signifies social value’ (p. 11).
Finally, the term ‘iconic’ suggests that iconic photographs are not only widely known and culturally resonant but also publicly sanctified. This idea, used conspicuously by Hariman and Lucaites, is greatly indebted to Christian traditions of venerating religious images, although it is also – as we elaborate below – connected to the institutional structures of modern journalism. The importance of sacredness finds a parallel in the idea that photography can be auratic, in Walter Benjamin’s (1980, 1992) sense, constituting a record of the unique spatiotemporal field of the depicted object. Iconic photographs are thus doubly sanctified, their public canonization anchored in and reinforcing the sanctification that photography bestows on the referent’s existential uniqueness. Brink (2000), in fact, identifies three analogies between religious icons and historic photographs: their ‘intense symbolic impact’, their authenticity or ‘special affinity to reality’, and their canonization, expressed through extensive reproduction and distribution in different media. Yet, while iconic photographs are canonized through repeated circulation, this may also corrode their intensity and uniqueness. Certain kinds of appropriation might lead not to canonization but to desacralization, until the images are devoid of the significance that made them iconic in the first place. The possibilities for such desacralization have been greatly magnified in the new media environment.
Iconic photographs in the new media environment
The sanctified historic and symbolic power of iconic photographs depended on distinctive practices of image production, dissemination, and alteration that characterized the mass ‘media regime’. These practices have been increasingly destabilized in the contemporary media environment, principally in two overlapping domains: institutions and technology.
The key relevant institutional characteristic of the previous regime was the centrality of professional journalism. Key factors for iconic photographs include the role of the professional photojournalist as their primary source – informed by an occupational habitus based on norms of factual and moral ‘witnessing’ (Zelizer, 2007), the importance of editorial and publishing personnel as gatekeepers controlling publication and distribution, and the role of legal and contractual frameworks (e.g. copyright, commercial licensing) in governing, and limiting, processes of replication and alteration. As a consequence, possibilities for republication were mostly made available within journalism, but also within similarly centralized and demarcated institutions, such as book and magazine publishing, advertising and marketing, and the established art world. In most cases, the professional, contractual, and hierarchical structures in play contributed to the sanctification of iconic photographs since their use was sanctioned by legitimate institutions enjoying extensive cultural authority.
While aspects of this regime have remained in force, certain important shifts have weakened it. These include the increasing dependence on non-professional user-generated images in the form of citizen journalism (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2011), the blurring boundaries and struggles for cultural authority between professional and non-professional practitioners and genres (Sjøvaag, 2011), and the spread of user-monitored and participatory editorial models (Deuze, 2003). All these reconfigure the institutional framework for the circulation of iconic photographs in favor of more decentralized, less authoritative, and potentially more democratic uses and appropriations.
Technological changes are crucial to these institutional developments. Already existing iconic photographs – the focus of this article – become ‘networked images’ (Rubinstein and Sluis, 2008) available for instant replication and mass distribution using social network services that bypass traditional gatekeepers, while ubiquitous image-manipulation software enables ordinary individuals to disseminate radically altered versions to large audiences. Dependence on software processes for storage, replication, distribution, and display means that iconic photographs – like other fixed media ‘documents’ – have now become impermanent, real-time, dynamic ‘performances’ (Manovich, 2013: 33–34).
Such ‘performances’ can raise issues beyond their original audiences and targets, allowing diverse publics to appropriate the iconic photo for new purposes. At the same time, however, these appropriations reveal a fundamental paradox: the more a photograph is recycled, the more it may influence the public – yet the more the original referential context may be lost in the process. For instance, Ibrahim (2016) argues that parodic versions of the Tiananmen ‘Tank Man’ image express resistance to Chinese state censorship while also being ‘stripped from context, re-hashed and endlessly circulated as cultural artefacts bearing the burden of history yet being disenfranchised from it’ (p. 593). For iconic photographs, recycling is thus a definitional condition and a potential death threat. In a way, iconic photos are victims of their own success, as the diminution of their original reference is a condition for reaching iconic status: when a photograph becomes iconic, it is ‘revised, circulated, and reissued in various venues until whatever reality its subject first possessed has been drained away’ (Rabinowitz, 1994: 87).
The emblematic indexicality of iconic photographs
The fit of iconic photographs for public salience and extensive replication hinges on a crucial semiotic duality: they are at once particular and universal, concrete and abstract. Frosh (2012) calls this duality ‘emblematic indexicality’. Peirce’s (1958) concept of indexicality designates signs that ‘point to’ their objects through a causal or physical connection. Photography is usually treated as indexical because the light reflected from the objects and scenes before the camera makes contact with the light-sensitive emulsion (or photoelectric sensors in digital cameras), thereby ‘producing’ the image (Barthes, 1981; Doane, 2007). Anchored spatially and temporally, this indexical character nevertheless runs parallel to ‘emblematic’ or symbolic processes, for two reasons: because the image is also interpreted according to contextual cultural knowledge and conventions of representation and because interpretive procedures generalize the meaning of the objects depicted beyond their specificity; they may ‘stand for’ (a classic definition of representation) absent others, including larger populations, broad historical periods, and abstract concepts.
In the case of ‘Accidental Napalm’, the spatial indexical anchors are the human figures and the particular place in which they appear: these figures are identifiable as actual, nameable individuals who were before the camera at the time, including Kim Phuc, the naked girl. The temporal anchor is a precise moment, which can be specified through mechanical measures (date, time). However, these indexical anchors immediately lend themselves to extension and expansion: the spatial anchor is extended to ‘Vietnam’, ‘Vietnamese civilians’, and ‘soldiers’; the temporal anchor to the early 1970s; while contextual cultural knowledge at the moment of its first circulation connects it to the political and moral controversies and disintegrating consensus about the war among the American public.
However, with iconic photos the process of symbolic generalization is exceptionally extensive: they connote death, injustice, courage, patriotism, and hope in ways that move beyond the particular political and cultural climates of their first appearance. This universal dimension is afforded by the photo’s particular signifiers, although it frequently also taps into pre-existing symbolic frameworks. For instance, the connection between the suffering of Kim Phuc and the suffering of innocents in general is not simply due to her status as a child (or her nudity, to be discussed below), but to her Christ-like pose.
The recycling of iconic photos in different contexts, including with physical modifications, may facilitate and enhance the passage to a universal meaning, by detaching their primary signifiers from their indexical anchors or original contexts. Erasing pictorial elements that point to the Vietnam War, the United States or the 1970s would clarify and ‘unclutter’ the universal meaning of injustice. Yet, our study of the increasing range of appropriations of this photo suggests that the opposite trend may also be at work: not the universalization of the image’s meaning but its narrowing; not the sacralization of the picture but its trivialization. Benjamin argued that ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (quoted in Zelizer, 2000: 1). Today, however, the opposite may be true: an image of the past that is recognized by the present as one of its own concerns may be ‘performed’ and manipulated so often and drastically that it merely becomes one of many existing templates for digital memes.
To investigate this trend, we analyze variations of ‘Accidental Napalm’ found in Hariman and Lucaites’ work, as well as through a search on the Internet databases Google Images and Know Your Meme. We draw a typology of these variations, organized along a graded scale of emblematic indexicality, which correspond to layers of meanings that have accumulated over time. After analyzing an example for each category, we discuss the significance of the variations for each group of memes and draw general conclusions.
Both the typology and the discussion are offered in the tradition of critical interpretive analysis: they are analytical since they foreground the relations between distinctive formal attributes of the images under consideration; they are interpretive in that they focus on possibilities for meaning that are made available; and they are critical in that they make judgments, evaluating the images’ broader social, cultural, and political implications. Clearly, any truly holistic and comprehensive account of the shifting cultural significance of an image and its variants would also need to provide detailed accounts both of the specific situated contexts for producing and distributing each version (the kind of work undertaken in production studies) and of the generation of particular meanings among specified viewers (the kind of research associated with audience studies). However, such accounts would be complementary to what we propose here, not a substitution for it; 3 our approach is based on the belief, long held across the humanities and much of the social sciences, and persuasively outlined in Thompson’s (1990) ‘methodological framework of depth hermeneutics’, that ‘the meaningful objects and expressions which circulate in social fields are also complex symbolic constructions which display an articulated structure’ (p. 284; original italics) and that this structure requires independent analysis and interpretation. We also assume, of course, that ‘the process of interpretation is necessarily risky, conflict-laden, open to dispute: The possibility of a conflict of interpretation is intrinsic to the process of interpretation’ (p. 290; original italics).
Analyzing the iconic photo as a meme
The variations we will study are ‘memes’ – a concept first coined by Dawkins (1976) to designate cultural artifacts that spread through replication and mutation (Blackmore, 1999). The digital era has given the concept new quantitative and qualitative dimensions, so much so that we now live in a ‘hyper-memetic era’, in which ‘user-driven circulation of copies and its derivatives is a prevalent logic’ (Shifman, 2013: 373).
Our research led us to an array of 34 different memes, that is, distinctive variations of ‘Accidental Napalm’. Some of these memes have spawned their own variants in turn. 4 We ranked them based on their resemblance to the indexical anchors (people, objects, background) of the original image, as well as the extent to which they affected the ‘integrity’ of the original: its compositional coherence as a totality. This ranking process connected technical modifications (ranging from slight to radical alterations) to the creation of new cultural and political meanings while also tracking changes in the contexts of production and publication (e.g. caption, source, author’s identity).
Based on these criteria, we propose a four-point continuum of ‘Accidental Napalm’. These are variants that (a) condemn the Vietnam War and/or the conduct of the war by the United States, (b) denounce other wars or war in general and/or criticize American policy or society, (c) target specific perpetrators of crimes or objects of scandal which are unrelated to war, and (d) foreground technical manipulation and incongruous intertextual references in order to amaze or amuse viewers.
Table 1 summarizes the gradation of the 34 memes according to this fourfold classification. Following is an analysis of each category and relevant examples.
Classification of the 34 memes of the ‘Accidental Napalm Attack’ iconic image.
Vietnam war–related images: expounding the meaning of the original photo
The first category is most directly connected to the dominant interpretations of the original photograph immediately after its initial publication: the Vietnam War as a human and moral disaster and the responsibility of the United States and its leaders for what occurred. These images are more faithful to the original indexical anchoring and compositional integrity: accordingly, the modifications – such as turning the photograph into a drawing or a painting, changing the perspective or angle, or overlaying a new element onto the image – tend to retain the original composition and enable its easy recognition. They also all have identifiable authors.
Even though the number of memes strongly related to the Vietnam War has diminished, their continued presence illustrates the centrality of the trauma it caused. These appropriations of ‘Accidental Napalm’ not only confirm that the Vietnam War has left its mark on American collective memory but also point to a continuing struggle over its meaning (Hariman and Lucaites, 2003: 59).
Compared to the original, these variations directly address the question of American responsibility. Certainly, since its first publication, the original version has been interpreted and used as an anti-war critique of the United States, despite awareness that the napalm attack was an accidental strike by South Vietnamese soldiers on South Vietnamese civilians, without the involvement of American troops. But the anti-American interpretation was developed against the visual elements that composed the picture: except for the photographers, only visible in the uncropped version, all the characters in Nick Ut’s photograph (including the soldiers) are Vietnamese; thus, the American absence is made apparent in the original visual. In a way, the memes corrected this dissonance by incarnating US moral responsibility as a visible presence, simply by adding American characters or symbols to the original photo. This is the case in Ed Chilton’s montage (Figure 2) analyzed by Hariman and Lucaites (2003).
Ed Chilton, 2000 (reproduced by Hariman and Lucaites, 2003: 50).
The superimposition on the original photo of the image of New York’s Cardinal Spellman, who supported the Vietnam War, and the American flag was meant to point an accusing finger at those held responsible for the conflict’s casualties. It exemplifies what Boltanski (1999) identifies as the ‘topic of denunciation’ in the mediation of distant suffering: a shift from pity for the sufferer to condemnation of her persecutor. The attention no longer focuses on the little girl but is fragmented and displaced, from her to the Cardinal and the American Flag – just as the expected feeling of pity for the girl’s pain is redirected, in the form of indignation, at the United States.
Although other variations adding American characters are more ambiguous than this example, this category of memes tends to support Hariman and Lucaites’ argument that subsequent visuals were likely to enhance public deliberation.
Images related to war and/or outrage at the United States: expanding the meaning of the original photo
Some images of ‘Accidental Napalm’ retained the anti-war message but applied it to other conflicts. These images emerged in the 1980s, and almost all have identifiable authors. For example, in the 1987 image ‘It is Beautiful to Love the World with Eyes Not Born’, Juan Sanchez depicts Kim Phuc among children in a hospital in Nicaragua (see Table 1). The image is meant to condemn the victimization of innocent children in the Contra War. But most of the variations on that theme, and especially those targeting the United States as the perpetrator, were released during the 1991 Gulf War or since 2004 in reference to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some of these images point to specific war crimes, such as torture in the Abu Ghraib prison; others convey more general condemnation of US militarism. For example, in one of his anti-war pieces, captioned ‘Napalm’ (Figure 3), street artist Banksy isolated the figure of Kim Phuc from its original context and made it the central character, holding hands with Mickey Mouse and Ronald MacDonald.
Napalm by Banksy, 2004 (retrieved from Google Images).
The image plays on shocking contrasts: a little girl screaming in pain versus two smiling characters; the crude white-and-black image of a naked girl versus colorfully clothed mascots; a real person who has made the news and marked our history versus fictional characters invented by entertainment and fast food companies; the symbol of a traumatic national event versus symbols of American consumerism and cultural imperialism. Through these contrasts, the artist imposes connections. The leisure society hides the ugly militarist face of the United States. Moreover, the oppression and exploitation of the weak abroad may well be the condition for maintaining consumer luxury at home. The mixing of different universes and tones is meant as a ‘shock to thought’, in Deleuzian terms (Massumi, 2002).
This image also illustrates more radical technical modifications of the original photo: Kim Phuc has been extracted and reintegrated into a new setting alongside two characters who belong to a seemingly different historical and cultural universe. This extraction and reconfiguration mixes incongruous cultural categories – the juxtaposition of a real victim of suffering alongside fictional symbolic figures of US corporate and consumer culture – that viewers can resolve by interpreting its purpose as political critique. Hence, whereas Hariman and Lucaites use this image to illustrate variations conveying an anti-war message, we contend that Banksy has taken the political dimension of the criticism much further. This image does not denounce either the American conduct of a specific war or American militarism. Rather, it is an all-encompassing rejection of what the United States represents and projects in the world: its policy, society, culture, and entire set of values. Therefore, this second category of memes expands, rather than expounds, the meaning of the original iconic photo far beyond the denunciation of the Vietnam War or war per se, expressing strong ideological criticism of the United States and denouncing injustice, mostly conceived in terms of physical or symbolic violence toward the weak.
Images that displace the denunciation of injustice: dislocating the significance of the iconic photo
The third category includes memes that shift the focus of attention from Kim Phuc to other, more contemporary individuals and denounce forms of injustice, such as police brutality or pedophilia, only indirectly, through the mocking of these individuals. Many of these memes are authored anonymously. One example is the image of the alleged pedophile British DJ and television presenter Jimmy Savile running after the Vietnamese children. The image ostensibly targets Savile as an individual accused of 214 cases of abuse on adults and on prepubescent children. These claims were publicized a year and a half after his death so that Savile, while widely vilified, was never formally charged. However, in the image, Savile’s incongruously large size, perverse smile, and absurd posture (Figure 4), mimicking the pose of Kim Phuc herself, undermine, if not negate, both criticism of pedophilia and pity for her. Similar images have put other alleged or convicted pedophiles, such as British musician Gary Glitter, in the presence of the naked girl.
Jimmy Savile running after children, pseudonym TwelveCharlie on blog FunnyJunk, 2013 (retrieved from Google Images).
There is, in fact, a key formal distinction between the kinds of replication and imitation performed in the Savile meme and the other examples given so far. The others tend to abstract and extend the message of suffering or protest through techniques of extraction: key figures from the original photograph, chiefly Kim Phuc, are copied and introduced into a new context (the exception to this is Figure 2, the Chilton image, which overlays a translucent American flag and the face of Cardinal Spellman over the original photograph without, however, altering it). In contrast, the Savile meme performs an act of implantation into the original photograph that directly alters the image’s narrative and ethical center: the suffering of Kim Phuc. Her pain has been transformed into fear of (an absurdly posed) Savile. Implantation is a more radical transformation than extraction or overlaying. It directly reconfigures the figural and semantic coherence of the original as an integral whole, revoking the indexical specificity of the photograph and diverting the moral and political resonance which this indexicality underpinned. The nakedness of the girl is used to make sexual references that shock and mock a specific individual rather than incriminate a policy or deviance in general, such as pedophilia. In the process, the iconic photo loses its distinctive power, not only in terms of aesthetics and composition but also regarding ethics and politics.
There is an ambivalence here that is connected to the institutional and technological shifts in the media regime discussed earlier. On one hand, these memes illustrate the emergence of digitally enabled democratic ‘participatory culture’ that makes creative public expression a real possibility. Public expression through playing with cultural codes is no longer the preserve of an artistic elite, such as Banksy or Muniz (see Table 1). Ubiquitous technologies of image distribution and manipulation, and the weakening of gatekeeping hierarchies and contractual-legal restraints, help enrich public culture, turning the audience into producers and, potentially, more active citizens. On the other hand, the old mass media regime’s containment of recycling and manipulation to a sanctioned institution – such as the world of art with its traditions of using montage and imitation for aesthetic and political critique – also tended to preserve the iconic photo as a socially responsible form, whose appropriation was undertaken by identifiable authors in ‘good faith’: either indexical faithfulness to the ‘auratic’ uniqueness of those depicted or thematic faithfulness to the moral seriousness of its emblematic meanings. In contrast, the Savile meme threatens to elevate ridicule and provocation to the degree that it constitutes a form of insult to the dignity of the depicted, their particular anguish, and the role of sanctification itself in demarcating human suffering as an object of moral sympathy rather than entertainment. This category of memes thus challenges Hariman and Lucaites’ (2007) argument that recycled photos return to the ‘original meaning’ of the iconic image, activating public awareness because their extensive circulation can ultimately ‘transcend events’ (p. 203).
Images that amaze and/or amuse: destroying the significance and iconicity of the picture?
As Shifman (2013) remarks, memes frequently transform the original tone of iconic photos from seriousness to ‘explicit playfulness’, which mostly takes two different forms depending on whether the appropriations are ‘politically oriented’ or ‘pop-culture-oriented’: ‘if in the politically oriented versions of the meme the keying is mainly sardonic, in the pop-culture-oriented ones the main tone is amused and humorous’ (p. 372). Pop-culture oriented memes amuse us at the expense of the original photo’s authority.
Our final example, the ‘Cigar Guy’ meme (Figure 5), provides a good illustration, created using Photoshop, based on a photograph of professional golfer Tiger Woods, taken during the 2010 Ryder Cup in Wales. The image initially began circulating online because it perfectly caught Tiger Woods’ ball flying straight toward the camera, but the attention soon shifted to a spectator in the public surrounding Woods. Wearing a turban and fake mustache and smoking a cigar in tribute to Spanish golfer Miguel Ángel Jiménez, the man was eventually dubbed ‘Cigar Guy’ and appeared in user-modified celebrated paintings, movie posters, and historical photos, including three of the most iconic photos of the Vietnam War: the Buddhist monk burning himself to death in Saigon (Malcolm Browne, 1963), the execution of a Vietcong guerrilla (Eddie Adams, 1968), and ‘Accidental Napalm’ (Nick Ut, 1972). These photos are traumatic images of suffering and death. The ‘Cigar Guy’ meme, when combined with these images, amuses by creating an intertextual incongruity: between the compassion and pain that we are requested to feel when viewing the original photo and the laughter invited by the additional memetic figure. Like the Jimmy Savile meme, ‘Cigar Guy’ is based on an implantation into the iconic image that fundamentally changes the entire narrative and ethical configuration of the original. Here, however, rather than the cause of Kim Phuc’s pain being reassigned, she herself has been deleted by ‘Cigar Guy’. This is an important shift: in the first two groups of images, the girl shares the stage with the new figures (Cardinal Spellman or Mickey Mouse); in the third group, the new figures become more important than the girl (who is reduced to being an object of abuse for Savile); in this last category, the girl disappears completely, removed from history and replaced by the memetic figure. The destruction of the iconicity of ‘Accidental Napalm’ is achieved simultaneously in two dimensions: emblematically, by erasing its key topic of suffering, and indexically, through the material annihilation of the figure of the girl.
‘Cigar Guy’ meme version, 2010 (retrieved from Know Your Meme).
It is perhaps somewhat passé to observe that the memes produced are simulacra (Baudrillard, 1995): the signifiers are disconnected from their historical signifieds and reassigned according to the users’ will and wit. In a postmodernist posture, simulacra are hailed as the expression of creative revolt based on the détournement of what modernity has fixed, consecrated, and sacralized. Defined as a method of subversion consisting of ‘turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself’ (Holt, 2010: 252), ‘détournement’ emerged in the 1950s (Debord and Wolman, 1956) in reaction to ‘récuperation’ – the commodification and re-appropriation of the counter-culture by the hegemonic cultural realm.
It is certainly possible to interpret memes such as ‘Cigar Guy’ as a détournement of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ photo, and hence as a profoundly political intervention. If, by altering her image, it effaces the identity of the little girl and the recollection of her suffering, this – it could be claimed – is the price we must pay to free ourselves from a cultural memory canonized through oppressive institutions, rituals, and media practices.
Performing the ‘funny and silly’, this type of meme could thus make a contribution to ‘media idiocy’, which Goriunova (2012) defines as ‘a mode of living that explores the true through the false’ (pp. 223–224). In line with Bergson’s (2008) understanding of humor, the paradigmatic functions of idiocy are ‘estrangement and reversal’ (Goriunova, 2012: 229), two features that we do indeed find in memes like ‘Cigar Guy’. However, Goriunova insists that this humor, while appearing to be light, also needs to be deeply serious in what it reveals: the trials of the current human condition. It is this crucial dimension that seems absent from the implantation of ‘Cigar Guy’ into ‘Accidental Napalm’: rather than a reversal that reveals the human condition, it merely revels in the wit of its creator and potential interpreters.
This category of memes thus exemplifies a new media configuration described recently by Kien (2013). Here, people are not challenged with new ideas, but rather, consume challenging ideas with an attitude of sarcasm and irony, as if all content is merely for one’s own entertainment and comes with no ‘real world’ consequences attached to it. In such circumstances, intelligence may be displaced by cleverness, demonstrated in the ability to transform media content from one intended meaning to another in an act of postmodern playfulness. (p. 556)
We are thus moving from détournement – which was more characteristic of our second category of memes (e.g. Banksy’s image) – to mere récréaction, that is, an egotistic distraction, or what Kien (2013) characterizes as ‘a solipsistic, self-referential, closed, exclusive, and ultimately dysfunctional approach to community that accepts offending others as a normal part of everyday experience’ (p. 560). Is the degradation of iconic photographs for the sake of récréaction necessarily accompanied by a degradation of public deliberation? Might it be an extreme instance in the emergence of ‘ironic spectatorship’ (Chouliaraki, 2013) as the defining mode of ‘post-humanitarian’ responses to distant suffering, where the self-absorption of the viewer – rather than the pain of the other – becomes the object of attention? Against these views, one may still object that the memes composing this last category nevertheless convey a political message, albeit against their authors’ intentions; the degradation of iconic images may be interpreted as political contestation of sanctified authority. The debate on the implications of desacralization remains open.
Conclusion
Iconic photographs are characterized by their wide circulation, repetition, and recycling across media platforms, and their achievement of emblematic indexicality. This trait confronts us with a paradox: The more an iconic photo is circulated, the more it is recognized as iconic, yet the more it may become devoid of the significance that made it iconic in the first place.
Iconic photos have the potential to spawn multiple memes, cultural objects spreading through replication and mutation. Table 1 makes the memetic trend apparent. But whereas Jenkins et al. (2009) warn that, in our ‘hyper-memetic era’, ‘if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’, in the case of iconic photos, the spreading of memes may kill the host. At least, our study suggests that one category of memetic derivatives threatens not only the meaning of the iconic photo but also its political and ethical significance.
Certainly, our current research is not an invitation to indulge in nostalgia and a longing for sanctity. Contesting Hariman and Lucaites’ claim that the original ‘Accidental Napalm’ photo had the power to shape public debate, Westwell (2011) has demonstrated not only that the impact of the picture has been overestimated but also that, from the outset, the photo underwent a drastic process of gatekeeping, which involved cropping, shifting of focus and alteration of lighting. The photo was manipulated to serve news organizations’ goals so that what we know today as the original iconic image is not the photo actually taken by Ut. Yet, it is the image that served as a reference point and formal blueprint for subsequent renderings bearing the potential for expounding meaning and expanding significance while also involving risks of appropriation for narrower, narcissistic purposes. Perceiving the precise nature of these appropriations is vital not only for understanding how iconic photographs create meanings over time around shared values but also for distinguishing between memes that enhance democratic public debate and those which degrade it.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.