Ethnographic photobomb: The materiality of decolonial image manipulation

Indigenous photobomb art

The photobomb in visual composition springs from the popular practice of photobombing, the sudden disruption of a photograph in process by an additional subject in the frame—focalizing the image through the relationship between intended and unintended subject. Photobombs have become a common meme genre. The photobomb became an ironic or anti-aesthetic practice of compositional disruption in edited images; here, digital cloning and suturing is often deliberately poor, and the unintended subject may belong to a different time, place, context, or medium altogether. Limor Shifman (2014b: 89–91) describes how many photo-based memes rely on juxtaposition of two or more photographic elements. Yet the humor in a photobomb meme relies on the viewer’s awareness of how the basic properties of digital image processing frame the juxtaposed subjects. Some subgenres introduce dramatic irony, where artists clone subjects into a target photograph to introduce a critical perspective through juxtaposition. The quality of image editing in these instances can vary depending on the stance of the final image.

Indigenous photobomb art operates on a similar dynamic. For artists like Judd, this has meant digitized ethnographic photographs. Judd appropriates a pre-digital visual discourse in which sepia-toned photographs of Natives continue to do more to imprint, rather than record, cultural images—a discourse that Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) (2009: 124) argues designates Native people the “institutional objects of knowledge and political power.” The visual irony in a Steven Paul Judd image surfaces at the border of the assumed historicity of the image, with its remediated ethnographic signifiers, and the visual wordplay of fantasy/sci-fi movie characters. Culturally familiar viewers identify these photos as authentic, if exotic, representations of Native people. The insertion of fictional characters disrupts the claims to truth that we have been trained to see by the genre of the ethnographic photograph, including its base claim of separating the Native Other from technological progress and the use of media technologies. Phil Deloria observes how anomalies generate humor on the basis of audience expectations, where these are written into images; he construes these inscribed expectations as “both the products and the tools of domination” (2004, 4). Much has been made of Judd’s use of imagery from the Star Wars franchise, but his most incisive commentary and critique come from the use of characters and imagery from other properties, many of which move beyond cinema. A small set of images demonstrates Judd’s broader approach to decolonial aesthetics, exceeding the pop art of his Star Wars images to address specific political discussions in the public sphere.

The aesthetic features of the analog image enable better compositing because these features introduce noise. In addition to sepia monochrome, audiences expect to see poor resolution, blurring, and other artifacts that refer to the physicality of the original photograph. These features obscure the visible edges in cloned portions of the image. Many of Judd’s memes do not involve seamless clones, but their sutures fit with the genre of the original photograph. “Untitled (Alien)” (3 June 2016; Figure 1) demonstrates Judd’s use of blurred edges and simulated/superimposed visual artifacts like creases to obscure cloning seams. The creases also lend the image a haptic quality, a historicity implied by trace damage from human hands. The digitized original is a Frank Rinehart photograph, a portrait of a man named Afraid-Of-His-Track (Assiniboine) taken in 1898. The new photoshopped image works as a visual pun and makes an argument about which figure is “alien,” engaging in a contemporary conversation about U.S. immigration policy. The pun operates much like a meme produced by Gregg Deal (Paiute) in 2015 titled “Not Confident about Immigration Reform” (Figure 2) and speaks to mainstream memes made from a well-known Geronimo image superimposed with text like “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” and “As far as I’m concerned, you’re all Illegal Aliens” (Figure 3). These memes highlight settler violence and the hypocrisy of anti-immigration sentiment while also opposing reactionary anti-immigration memes. Beyond the immediate wordplay of Judd’s “illegal Alien,” the sutured image presents a secondary critique about representation in Hollywood movies. The juxtaposed tropes are associated with differing genres, one linked with the future and the other with the past, pointing to mainstream settler myths about the “vanishing Indian” that make their way into futurist genres like science fiction by way of Indigenous absence onscreen. Like other Judd memes that feature Hollywood monsters, “Untitled (Alien)” evokes the grotesque and monstrous, recalling the use of Indigeneity in horror cinema. Native absence itself is conceptualized as monstrous in movies and television, as in the “Indian burial ground” trope. ⁵ The use of the xenomorph from the Alien franchise implicates Hollywood as a media industry and machine of settler image production.

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Figure 1.

Steven Paul Judd, “Untitled (Alien)” (3 June 2016).

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Figure 2.

Gregg Deal (Paiute), “Not Confident About Immigration Reform” (2015).

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Figure 3.

Unknown, “You’re all illegal aliens”.

Appropriating similar tropes across other visual media, Steven Paul Judd has also used iconic video game characters for his images, with an eye for how the interplay of visual design, theme, and game mechanics reinforce settler values. With “Invaders of Our Space” (14 December 2014; Figure 4), Judd borrows a photograph taken by a Cree photographer named Richard Throssel titled “Singers.” The photograph depicts “[a] group of Native American people in ceremonial dress standing in a line outside performing a song”. Judd’s version of the image, however, presents the same Plains horsemen looking out on a sepia-toned landscape into which a gigantic 8-bit Space Invaders sprite has landed. Judd renders the sprite in 3D pixelated form, giving the image a surreal quality as it simulates a photogravure capture of a living digital figure, including an applied texture for visual artifacts that match the features of the analog original. Its visual pun borrows from the name and narrative of the iconic video game sprite to critique settler-colonial expansion, similar to “Alien.”

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Figure 4.

Steven Paul Judd, “Invaders of Our Space” (14 December 2014).

From a medium-specific view, “Invaders of Our Space” evokes issues of representation in interactive media like games, which rarely place Native characters, concerns, aesthetics, or stories at the center of a gaming experience. The gameplay is especially operative here. In Space Invaders (1978, Taito), the player holds off an endless onslaught of aliens descending from the sky, until she cannot keep up and is overwhelmed. The mechanics are simple: the player cannot win but only hold out as long as possible according to her skill and reflexes, adding an additional layer to the critique. In a broad sense, “Invaders of Our Space,” along with its companion memes titled simply “The Invaders,” makes Indigenous futurist claims on the basis of its sci-fi theme and its medium-specific sprite figure, speaking to the video game industry rather than Hollywood. Though Space Invaders is a vertical sci-fi shooting game, it recalls other iconic games that operate on explicitly settler mechanics, especially 4X games like Civilization (1989–present) whose gameplay involves exploration (scouting the game map), expansion (claiming territory), exploitation (extracting and using resources), and extermination (eliminating local communities), to express a settler-colonial perspective on environment. Such gameplay articulates a proceduralism at the core of settler colonialism, which claims space according to discrete, bite-sized processes (Byrd, 2016: 426–7). The source–target image suture in “Invaders of Our Space” shifts the audience’s relationship to the screen by rendering the sprite in 3D; it places the photograph(er) inside an interactive, computational medium fraught with its own history of violences.

One image stands out among other Judd ethnographic photobombs for the way the final composite appears rendered in photorealistic detail (including depth of field). Two versions of the meme, “Untitled” (2016, Figure 5) and “You’ve Arrived, Ayyeee!” (2019, Figure 6), bear a similar composition to “Invaders of Our Space”; yet, rather than an 8-bit video game sprite, they engage with a different interactive medium: the Google Maps online mapping platform and its location pins. “You’ve Arrived, Ayyeee!” borrows a digitized photogravure by Edward Curtis (1905), a “[r]ear view of four Crow Indians, including Shot in the Hand and Bull Chief, on horseback, Montana.” The meme’s earlier untitled iterations from 2015–16 instead used another photograph by Richard Throssel, of a group of mounted Plains horsemen in headdresses. In both cases Judd clones a Google Maps “A” pin into the digitized photo, critiquing settler aesthetics beyond the level of representation or content. Instead, the composite image warps viewers’ perspective, reorienting them to a location they are only used to seeing represented informatically on a digital map. A looming “A” pin, presented in photorealistic detail and with no simulation of analog artifacts, implies a proximal destination: home. The meme critiques a Eurowestern cartographic paradigm, literalizing the way that mapping conventions superimpose spatial interpretations on actual, lived places. “You’ve Arrived, Ayyeee!” interrogates the “terra nullius” assumptions coded into digital platforms like Google Maps, which carry the guise of enhanced empiricism over earlier cartographic forms. And the meme pokes fun at the ways Indigenous people are the original objects—not subjects—of cartographic media.

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Figure 5.

Steven Paul Judd, “Untitled” (20 March 2016).

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Figure 6.

Steven Paul Judd, “You’ve Arrived, Ayyeee!” (2019).

Just as with “Invaders of Our Space,” the Google Maps pin shifts the “You’ve Arrived” memes into an interactive, computational context. It also resituates the actual Indigenous people in the image as potential subjects or users of that technical platform. What gets composited in “You’ve Arrived” is a more direct, metonymic signifier for the medium; more importantly, by defamiliarizing that medium, the meme resituates the image in an informatic context. We often read informatic images as if the medium itself is apolitical, because it’s constituted primarily of (ostensibly) objective data. Much like cinema, the interactive and networked medium of an online platform like Google Maps instead remains political, hegemonically imposing Eurowestern notions about space. Thanks to the affordances of digital image processing, Judd’s images move beyond representation to reorient viewers to an array of visual mediums themselves. The examples above will help explicate how the technical features of digital image processing operate in the context of Indigenous and settler arts, including their circulation as memes.

Digital image manipulation: materiality, algorithms, and noise

One layer of meaning in photobomb memes derives from digital compositing, a metaprocess comprising various algorithms that transform visual data already once or twice remediated from lived experience. Digital image processing, as a material practice, differs from prior editing methods, like those employed by Edward Curtis and other pictorialists. The material properties of a digital image enable the affordances of graphics editing software to manipulate the digital as material. Affordances reflect what Adrienne Shaw (2017: 594) calls the “action possibilities” emerging from the formal and material qualities of things, which are interpretive and exist somewhere between the subjective and objective valences of design. Yet digital photo editing works in relation to its analog antecedents, as our abstract understandings of them are rendered in design software. Action possibilities converge when we use the analog (e.g. a blur or smudging tool) to conceptually access the digital (pixel values). This is doubly true for digitized ethnographic photographs and other genres marked by analog aesthetic signifiers. In this context, the material relationships and remediations of the analog and digital in software complicate O’Neill’s (2008: 16) assertion that digitality “removes the photographic image from its duty as a record of reality.” Control over pictorial space, even at the pixel level, always works through both. Ethnographic photobombs still encourage viewers to read the image in relation to a documented, if manipulated, reality. In a digitized ethnographic image, a remediated aesthetic configuration structures a political relationship within and beyond the image. Judd’s ethnographic memes provoke another consideration: how does culture shape editing software, including the cloning, healing brush and other compositing tools? These tools don’t just modify visual data but process it.

This relationship begins with the materiality of a digital image in its basic modular unit: the pixel. As a set of easily manipulable values, pixels encode and generate light in a bidirectional process conceptualized by Gottlieb (2018: 91) as “two instrumentalities, two closely related forms, one for the production and the other for the consumption of digital information.” He refers to a visual paradigm that starts with light capture by photosites on an active-pixel image sensor (like those you’d find in a digital camera or cell phone) and ends with a display image. Digitized analog photographic images, with their own chemical methods of light capture, become pixel values. The new properties of this machine-readable information offer new affordances by virtue of being modular, replicable, transportable, and manipulable. Each of these properties has cultural implications—at base, they push authenticity further into visual composition rather than the medium or imaging technology itself. Shifman (2019: 53) distinguishes this “external authenticity” (a relation to an “objective truth”) from “internal authenticity” (an intrinsic meaning of the sender), which in the case of Judd’s images may be understood to lie in a decolonial perspective expressed aesthetically. Hansen (2004: 21) maintains, however, that digitization transforms “media from forms of actual inscription of “reality” into variable interfaces for rendering the raw data of reality.” Yet this transformation is additive. Here, rendering describes a broad conceptual and technical mode of visual translation and interpretation. After digitization, an image exists in this interpretive mode as digital devices instantiate it onscreen, through various rendering, editing, and display processes, and via networked circulation.

The formal attributes of a digital image are always in process. Rather than a static inscription of a settler reality, digital photographic images remain in this persistent state of reconstitution. Their existence as data-in-process makes digital images imminently modifiable and therefore unstable. They are fluid; the un-edited “pure” image is a fleeting mirage, thanks to its methods of capture and presentation by numerous mediating technologies. In this space, the methods of digital editing—manipulating the “raw data of reality”—produce unique effects. As algorithmic methods rely on a logic of equivalence and modularity, they also depend on mathematical assumptions about the nature of images. Design software returns to the analog by simulating physical image editing in an immediate way (e.g. smudging and cut-and-pasting tools), obscuring the mathematical processes underneath.

As one example of algorithmic image manipulation, diffusion demonstrates how pixels structure what we see. The effect involves diffusing pixel values with a convolution matrix, which uses a kernel to transform values in a source image. Many familiar editing tools operate on transformation algorithms—simple blurs, for example, also use kernels to modify pixel values. The tool applies a numerical matrix (kernel) to each pixel, multiplying kernel values by those pixel values around it to effect this transformation. Compositing methods rely on a similar logic. Poisson image editing, for example, instead blends data in the gradient domain (not pixel values but the relationship between pixel values), only requiring a mask to help determine which pixels should blend between the source and target images. Though not often seamless in practice, the blended gradient values offer good cloning and insertion. When Steven Paul Judd sutures one portion of a source image into a target, the composite bears little visual trace of manipulation but still feels off. The aesthetics of the image don’t meet expectations. The same is true for blend and smudge tools, which pick up and blend values from each pixel as the cursor moves over them. The healing brush presents a more complicated case, because the user borrows a sample of pixel data from another area of an image and then drags it, where target values are modified to retouch accordingly. The healing brush creates a unique kernel from within the image for the transformation of some other part. The visual traces left by these tools are the glitches that exist at the border of the technology and our conception of how it can be used, an instance in which the software’s processes become visible. When working with Indigenous images, these moments carry significance for Indigenous sovereignty as they interrupt the presumed neutrality of data (Erb et al., 2018). Such glitches disrupt the structured remediation of “raw reality,” shaped by settler culture.

These digital editing tools obscure the material qualities of the analog methods they simulate. Both leave critical traces, burdened with the ideologies of the technologies that produce them—glitches that we may consider noise. The process of modifying an image algorithmically recodes its visual information, a motion that introduces semantic instability and ambiguity (Ward, 2011: 99). Susan Ballard (2011: 60) claims that “[m]ovement no matter how imperceptible introduces noise”; as information moves, it gathers hints of “rupture” and “interference.” Noise in analog processing reflects traces of its physical methods. Although processing data via the pixel allows for the conceivable elimination of signal noise, digital editing likewise leaves behind visual artifacts that are present in the underlying data. In this context, visual noise does not interfere with so much as document actuality, recording an image’s many lives. The life of a digital image plays out in an altogether different modality. Artifacts that record the application of editing processes mark both data and metadata. Digital images like Judd’s complicate this picture further: artists may introduce visual artifacts in order to mimic analog aesthetics, a simulated materiality for coding authenticity and historicity into the image. The remediation of analog editing via the digital shifts our interpretation of noise on both sides of this divide. It frames the composite traces that structure our understanding of a visual analog-digital object.

None of the processes of digital image editing are politically neutral. Editing tools are designed, from transformation algorithms to user interfaces and how such tools are implemented in editing software. They are programmed to recognize particular data. For this reason, the digital manipulation of photographic images posits something different in the hands of an Indigenous artist. Indigenous materialisms are already at work beneath contemporary perspectives on settler media, which claim “the fabricated grounds of colonization: terra nullius—a land on which there are no others with prior claim” (Ravenscroft, 2018: 355). Digital materiality (including the practices that emerge from its affordances) carries an assumption about the relationship between image and person that reflects that settler perspective. Human bias permeates every stage of our ostensibly neutral image-making technologies, from calibration to processing and editing, analog to algorithm. ⁶ Like the physical methods of analog media, the mathematical basis for digital images and image editing lends a sense of objectivity to the tool itself. And yet an Indigenous relational approach to these technologies opens them to an exploration of how they recapitulate history (2Bears, 2014; Lewis, 2014; L’Hirondelle, 2014). Acknowledging these “computational creations as kin,” furthermore, moves us beyond recognizing shared agency toward avoiding the tendency “to prioritize the benefit of individuals over relationships” (Lewis et al., 2018). Designers and users speak to each other through the medium and through time, as the structures of digital imaging tools inflect their products. Métis/Cree media artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle (2014: 155) observes the “vital . . . relationship between processes, objects, and the data they hold” in the digital era. In light of this relation, recognizing that these processes are cultural products intimates the ways that the principle of data equivalence is itself ideological. The equivalence or neutrality of data, which like a terra nullius of information appears accessible and fluid, poses a contradiction: even as it unmoors the empirical authority of the photograph and opens a space for play, it disintegrates Indigenous images into their constituent parts, opening them further to the manipulation of settler institutions. Digital image editing cuts both ways.

A cursory analysis of ethnographic memes finds these alternate forces at play. For every Judd image, there are ten non-Indigenous memes that use an iconic photograph of Sitting Bull or Geronimo to endorse a reactionary stance. Both modes of semiotic play rest on the colonial history of the photograph, historically interpreted as a transparent medium, a perceptual interface by which the foreign body of the Indigenous Other can be captured, comprehended, and catalogued—a cultural interface and storage medium. Even 21st-century audiences have been trained to identify these photographs as authentic representations, while simultaneously holding a more fluid understanding about the relationship between image and referent. The current abundance of image filtering offers a powerful example of this incongruity. The sepia tone filter, for example, has not lost its sense of historicity. Photo filters on apps like Instagram still carry an air of historicalness—interrupted only by the familiar contemporary face we see in the image. The connotative meaning carried by the aesthetics moves both ways: digitized ethnographic photographs used as a target image in a meme carry the same qualities in their sepia monochrome, yet they conversely evoke image manipulation by their semblance of a digital filter. These valences are sutured together by way of a series of material and conceptual processes. Sepia images read as if remediated by both analog and digital technologies.

Modifying images concerned with historical “reality” may be problematic, yet layers of slippage in the authenticity of digital images open them to intervention by Indigenous artists. The language of digital image processing becomes useful in conceptualizing the transposition of a digitized image into a new context, where practices like photoshopping become tactical. Digital editing tools work aesthetically but also loosen the integrity of the image. Judd’s usage on both of these levels meets broader interpretations of tactical media as responsive, aesthetic and oppositional (Renzi, 2008). Conceptually, we can locate dissent through the software itself: to “undo” is to rethink an edit, to use the affordances of the graphics software to reverse a change, opening a freedom to experiment but also to question the image and view it as a process of algorithmic modification—ultimately, to question the form and presentation of all digital images-as-processes. Users who encounter an internet meme engage in a similar interpretive process: Wees (2002: 3) explains that “[t]o ‘undo’ an image means to loosen its connections to the cultural and ideological assumptions that lie behind its production and intended reception, so that it becomes available for . . . re-production and alternative reception . . .”. Images in material flux open to modification, to editing and recirculation toward alternative reception—a questioning of the prior memetic form. Where do the ethics of image editing shift, in light of photoshopping’s more destructive effects through history, from Curtis to the present? With the advancement of cloning algorithms and machine learning techniques that have brought us deepfakes, scholars are generally interested in distinguishing “legitimate” forms of image editing from image manipulation (Beck, 2016: 1). But this question of legitimacy poses a critical problem. The digital image editing practices of Indigenous artists defy the historical image by editing in order to reveal (not conceal) our relationships to them as they exist in the present. Judd’s artistic practice employs anachronic, transmedial image cloning—intended to distort or to be visibly “illegitimate.”

Digital images rely on visual adaptation, as pixels express attributes that lose specificity when the brain perceives a full image. Attributes like brightness or color disappear into the image through the adaptation process. Likewise, the generic qualities and expectations for an ethnographic image communicate as much as its details—precisely why it worked for Edward Curtis to alter small details that nevertheless signified much within the larger photograph. This presents an opportunity: Orzan et al. (2007: 1) explain that identifying and preserving the “relevant structures” allows one “to modify images in a way consistent with the information content.” Ethnographic photography establishes the relevant structures, yet Judd builds contrast into his images in relation to this very structure—harmonizing in composition but not content. His memes therefore refer back to but supersede an aesthetic history of analog photo editing (Wheeler, 2002: 15–16). The usefulness of photographic truths and untruths presents itself differently for digital images with an ethnographic legacy. Judd’s photobomb memes speak to a more recent history of digitized ethnographic photographs of Indigenous peoples. These memes articulate unique relationships to different visual mediums, each with its own troubled history of representing Indigenous people. The media networks on which these memes circulate, however, structure a whole new context for interpreting and interacting with them as images.

Indigenous (re-)memefication and digital redface

Contemporary content-sharing practices on social media platforms have shaped trends in digital image manipulation. Users design for shareability, riffing on increasingly memetic and referential content, where edited elements function as pastiche to reframe the image and generate humor or critique. Humor often derives from a trash aesthetic of poorly composited source and target images. As a broad class of memes, Shifman (2014b: 89–91) describes “memetic photos” as those that become memetic by “attract[ing] extensive volumes of [such] user-created responses.” For those discussed here, the ability to juxtapose contemporary content with already memetic historical images drives a particular set of responses. On platforms like Instagram, feeds also function as both galleries and avatars, where curated image content begins to stand in as a proxy for the user. Judd’s referential images, and the larger visual discourses and ethnographic practices that they engage with, encourage these formal qualities at the level of the image and network.

Indigenous artists and social media users interested in political engagement have taken up digital image manipulation in this context. Their aggregate circulation has produced an Indigenous sphere on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms. Marisa Duarte (Pascua Yaqui) (2017: 1) argues that, among other goals, Indigenous activists “harness [the] communicative affordances [of social media] to practice a politics of visibility, cultivate solidarity, [and] diffuse an Indigenous consciousness . . .”. Judd engages in a retroactive politics of ethnographic visibility by way of an Indigenous perspective on settler aesthetics. Shifman (2014b: 120) has identified digital (internet) memes as one key new medium in political participation, a way to “stimulate participatory activity” in younger media users. As humorous memes engage in political discourse, those that use pop art aesthetics engage across multiple popular and institutional discourses. Indigenous memes function as rhetorical action, designed to persuade and to imagine a world beyond the limitations of the image—evident in the work of Indigenous artists and activists across social media. Judd’s images accumulate meaning as digitized photographs, remediated ethnography and digitally edited images, all in the aesthetic and material contexts of digital memes. The formal elements of ethnographic photographs as memes are often taken up by two stances: one unironically (taking their supposed primitiveness at face value); the other with a historical and ironic perspective, as Indigenous artists reach back to imagine the political conditions of their making. Judd’s images establish an in-group of Indigenous users, yet they invite interaction through multifaceted participation structures. Their ironic tone and style allows them to meet their function within the broader discursive contexts in which they are embedded.

This posits a further dimension, which is their specific embedding in social media feeds, a curation context distinct from social media platforms themselves. This curational dimension is processual and manifold, always changing and unique to each user. Judd’s photobombs primarily share across social media (though a few of the most successful have becomes shirts and stickers). Social media platforms have different methods for curating content, however. For Twitter, the curation may occur according to followers and conversations of followers (personal user feed) or collated by hashtag, where visual content is a small portion of a feed. By contrast, Instagram is an image-centered medium; Judd’s Instagram page is self-curated, and visiting this page elicits a tiled gallery of images interspersed with other artwork. Each image is surrounded in this case by other memes of its genre but also other political art. The memefication of these images, and their life on social media feeds and profiles, requires that we examine them in that image-context. Other memes of the same class contribute to a given meme’s meaning, but so do the images that circulate with them in particular social mediaspheres. That is, their circulation via the feeds of different users signifies differently.

In the broader use-context of ethnographic photographs online, given that social media posts and pages function as aggregate avatars for users, memes put to use by non-Indigenous users can operate as digital redfacing, divorced from original context and with a superimposed air of exoticness, savagery, primitiveness, or indigeneity in their messages. Michelle Raheja (2010: 71) discusses redface among actors in the U.S. film industry in the 20th century: operating on a “logic of redface,” the practice assumes Indigenous absence and effaces Indigenous people in the film industry even as it represents them. This has in turn pervaded the world of digital media, from internet memes of white women in headdresses to video game voice-acting of Native characters by non-Indigenous actors (see Lacina, 2018). The ahistorical use of ethnographic photographs in mainstream internet culture—Sitting Bull and Geronimo are the most popular digitized photographs to memeify—may have an effect of effacing Indigenous users and voices from discussions in which their voices should be centered. Judd complicates this picture with his own ahistorical pastiche, yet by critiquing the history of such images and early media technologies, he interrogates these media practices from both ends. Judd takes aim at practices of cultural colonialism like digital redface by ironically contradicting their familiar connotations. In line with Shifman’s (2019) analysis of the communicative function of memes, Judd critiques the claims to external authenticity of the original memes but also proposes a kind of responsibility against the typical unbridled freedom expressed by internet memes. Shifman’s (2019: 54) articulation of freedom here requires a modification: Indigenous memes often question not only the freedom to distribute any information but, in Judd’s case, the freedom to manipulate any information. An internal authenticity of the image itself comes through alongside recontextualization, something not seen otherwise. These media practices lie on a continuum of neocolonial practices by which contemporary mass U.S. culture cannibalizes the images of Native people as a stand-in and a shorthand for all kinds of character types. This superficial use of ethnographic photographs in non-Indigenous memes is driven by a usefulness of the connotative meaning(s) about “the Indian,” which accumulated through the aesthetics of ethnographic images, as staged and manipulated by Edward Curtis and others in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Beyond its material processes, memes operate on a cultural process of compositing, a fundamental part of re-memefication. Appropriating images and resituating them outside their mass-media contexts can undo the conventions of media institutions. Judd and other Indigenous artists seek to do this with settler images that have fed institutional and popular conceptions of Native people in the U.S. Yet the settler-colonial politics of ethnographic images shift this dynamic: what constitutes “mass media” is a fraught landscape of images and image-making technologies that colors any intervention an Indigenous artist might make. Digital processing remediates the original and resituates it in a new context of immediate, popular social media content—a far cry from the static manipulated images of institutional archives. By extension, their circulation in a new media form reframes their meaning. Primary circulation through social media networks generates a web of contemporary digital memes where only analog memes and networks existed before, a settler archive signified by the original images.

Steven Paul Judd’s work, by virtue of disrupting the expansive settler archive, speaks to a cultural shift that Vilém Flusser (2011: 4) predicted in technical images, from “a centrally programmed, totalitarian society of image receivers and image administrators,” within which ethnographic images have traditionally been situated, toward “a dialogic, telematic society of image producers and image collectors.” Here, the shift turns upon the fulcrum of settler image institutions. Judd, Deal, and others like them are image producers, appropriating not merely prior images but the administrative paradigm itself as fodder for digital processing and play. Flusser (2011: 10) differentiates between “traditional” images, which are observations or depictions, and “technical” images, which are “computations of concepts,” which exceed compositional rules. The re-memeification of ethnographic photographs reflects a similar paradigm shift, away from the rules of depiction and toward the ways that image processing methods embody computational relationships between visual data. These new rules of processing are built on relational concepts compatible with Indigenous ways of knowing and creating, offering fertile but precarious ground for interventions by artists like Judd. As these memes circulate, they build a fluid digital archive that always speaks alongside and in opposition to its institutional predecessor.

Conclusion

The practice of re-memeification bears significance as to the question of Indigenous new media, as it hits at the oldest settler-colonial assumptions about Indigeneity and media technology use. These archetypal ethnographic images of Native people circulate as manipulated memes, digital interpositions in a long-standing discourse about the separation of Indigenous people and modern (and especially postmodern) media technologies. By examining Judd’s work, we can account for the ways that the technical processes of digital image editing shape meaning as well as posit new questions about cultural image archives. The layered processes of the creation and circulation of digitized analog photographs highlight how the affordances of digitized images open new modes of cultural and political critique for Indigenous artists. While these artists do take aim at the history of ethnographic photography, they use those very images to make claims about the relationship between Native people and technology in the settler imaginary.

We must closely question the formal equivalence of pixel data for its ideological assumptions. The property allows algorithmic processing to remediate the analog via raster graphics software, proving how working with digitized images displaces prior material processes between subject and image. Earlier settler values about the relationship between Native and non-Native cultures travel also into the digital domain, where numeric data carries a presumption of neutrality. Image play may reinforce these presumptions even as it works against the fixed definitions of conventional settler archives. As ethnographic photobombs move across social media platforms, they accumulate a new but referential memetic status on the basis of their composite aesthetic that gestures back to prior analog forms, while the modular structure of social media emphasizes a similar uniformity that Judd and others exploit in their work. By using digital editing tools to apply kernels and cloning algorithms to these layered photographs, Indigenous artists reappropriate both settler image and imaging technology.