Photographic images and memes seem largely irrelevant regarding their ways of circulation and their relationships with reality, with a contrast between referential and indexical, ambiguous and unambiguous. However, to what extent can memes learn from photography? What about the other way around? Photography, whether digital or analogue, retains its powerful function as a medium for social utility. The capacity of a photographic image embodies the particularity to show a specific sight, with which people identify, archive and distribute evidence of their life worlds. Traditional and digital circulations of news and social media contents reduce reality to representations and rely on symbols for knowledge transmission. Texts are added to images to provide additional contexts to sometimes colonize and transform the meaning. Through framing, cancelling and reframing narratives, power structures shape images into multiple visual fields that both enable and camouflage meanings and meaning-making processes. The visual and textual layers dialogically render the photographic images non-neutral and unstable, sometimes reducing them to mere illustrations of text.
Now that technology has continuously lowered the barriers to the production and distribution of images, the functionalities of both photography and memes are afforded to be expanded. Despite the fact that the different levels of technological advancements of photographic images and memes are obvious, photography’s mechanism of social confirmation and manipulation of visual meanings have expanded by memes’ affordances of multi-layered images combining texts with images, distributing a variety of images to a broader scale of trans-cultural audiences. The easy reproduction of forms and ambiguity, as well as the users’ willfully generated immaterial labor in cultural production, form various digital vernaculars and can be easily turned into a techno-liberal marketing project. Meme viewers are invited to read the meaning of their messages as shallow texts whose informational content is contained in its referentiality, rather than as fragments of tangled reality presented for interpretation. In this sense, memes are simultaneously an extension of photography and an amputation of it.
By navigating the encounters between meme images and Polaroid photography, my video essay below explores the alternative sites of knowledge production and new modes of subjectivities situated in digital space and contemporary frenzy.

My video essay on YouTube
Nostalgia, Polaroid and Memes
Why still bother comparing photography and memes, as their boundaries are disappearing? If photography acts as a pragmatic progenitor of meme images, the native speakers of the digital vernaculars can, in return, expand their vocabulary with a great embrace of photography and visual culture. Looking at the contemporary social and cultural landscapes and examining how technical images are complicated by these practices become urgent.
My research begins with a Polaroid camera. It was a birthday gift from a very close friend six years ago. I choose Polaroid not necessarily because the practice of analogue photography is purposefully rejecting digital technology… The resistance as such is largely romanticized. Instant analogue photography like Polaroid and meme images can both be seen as consumed relics regardless of cultural and historical contexts, and despite their qualities of reproductivity, levels of intimacy and material basis. Studying the entanglement of Polaroid photos and meme images through photographic practices, I attempt to resist the contemporary numbness and sadness through new modes of encounters, relations and subjectivities those images embody.

The camera I used, a Polaroid Supercolor 635CL
By reducing the significant lag time between the development and exposure of images in the darkroom work, Polaroid photography strategically predicts the immediacy of digital photography, resulting in a lively and party-like experience. The happenings of making images and viewing them take place almost simultaneously. This mediation of shooting experience and the production of a quickly made and easily consumed relic of it constitutes Polaroid’s quality as a commercialized product. The practice of taking Polaroids becomes a generic stylization, where the photos turn into distinct and intimate commodities.
Similarly, despite a more ambiguous socio-technological construction, memes are optimized for visual communication on the digital screen. These optimizing processes protect meanings and overcome the distortions inherent to digital circulations while traveling across cyberspace, which can be fit into a broader promotional and/or marketing project situated in the digital reality.
Polaroid photos and memes also seem similar on the level and forms as cultural landscapes, in terms of their social functions, banal nature and sets of vernaculars.
Just like Polaroid as a photographic apparatus for parties, meme images group people together as technical images in cultural consumption. Whether the prevalence of snapshot photos or randomly layered memes, both convey a sense of immediacy that exposes the banal moments of everyday life. Performed by untutored amateurs in a diversity of milieus, both kinds of images form specific vernaculars that facilitate cultural traction through wide reproduction and dissemination.
In The Postcard,[1] Derrida states that destination does not exist by examining how a destination can actively shift our interpretation of ideas when the destination itself is taken into account. Viral images, like the contemporary mutations of the Derridean postcards, are always molded, framed and destinated somewhere, provoking variations and multiplicity of interpretation. They are the most effective in concealing their materiality. They have become the ‘gestural assemblages’, where moods are codified into reiterable symbolic statements.[2] They are constituting an amalgamation of symbols that provoke our desensitization stimuli by media violence and its repercussions on the real world where the narrative context is lost and the gratification is permanently temporal.
Recent efforts have been seen as a nostalgic return to the analog and handmade cultures, summoning a digital revival of the manufacture of a Polaroid-like photo. Users can easily generate a heavily filtered digital photo with white borders by using algorithmic softwares. The societal desire for the physicality of analogue technologies, what Miyake has termed as technostalgia,[3] refers to a craving for a sense of security of material and hard technologies entrenched in the analogue past, in a digitalized reality where physical time and space are largely disintegrated.
Ironically, the attempt to capture imperfect and ‘authentic’ reality for a counter-narrative to the perfect digitality is itself stylized and commodified. Polaroid attempts to digitize memories and the unstable archiving of them by manufacturing new products that transform digital photos into Polaroid chemicals. In theory, you can print a digital meme into a Polaroid photo with a printer that was released recently. Through the historical transformation from traditional images to technical ones produced by apparatus, images no longer signify the phenomena from the real world, and instead, signify the concepts that are produced by scientific codes. As Vilem Flusser points out:

The lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous at a time when technical images are in the process of displacing texts – dangerous for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion.[4]

The transformation of medium from traditional image to technical image alters the ways of reception that are increasingly indoctrinated through technology. In the ‘black box’ where the operating space of indoctrination takes place, memes and Polaroid photos engage with their cultural contexts to trigger larger-scaled dynamics and movements that we witness today. In the digital realm where content serves as the primary means by which we project our identities and network with others, content consumption emerges as a pivotal force in uniting people socially. People are no longer drawn to one another by problems, but rather group themselves through technical images. This shift signals a profound transformation in how we organize and relate to the world around us.

Smoking, surfing, toileting
This motivates my performance-based research (or research-based performance) of remediating memes through Polaroid photography. I selected 6 memes from Instagram, RedNote and Pinterest that are feasible to be remade, giving them a personal retouch and reformulating the process of creating memes on chemicals, an alternative material basis. Additionally, I filmed the process of remaking as an attempt to mobilize the memes instead of merely presenting the surface of images. The video essay unfolds a process of intermedial transmission that happens between meme images, photographic images and moving images. These in-between moments enable a new way of relating, allowing one image to be a part of the other without lacking the social significance of the original. Destabilizing while simultaneously weaving the relations between the unattainable original and the remade, these moments negate demarcating and decisive processes of circulations in the physical and digital space.

Communicating with inanimate eggs/dumplings
Lost Future
The urge to return to the analogue past perhaps demonstrates a contemporary resistance to virality where memories are largely nullified and absent. Photography is sometimes associated with the concept of death, with frozen moments in time that highlight the impermanence of life. It invokes the sense that time has passed, and what is photographed is now gone.
The sense of presence that is sustained by instant photography offers Polaroid photos a unique perspective on space, time and death. This sort of spatial and temporal mimesis evokes a sense of longing for an absent affective past and nostalgia of a prosthetic memory, be it personally attached or socially entangled. They are uncommon witnesses to human experience — like ghosts, long gone yet refusing to be forgotten.
Is photography potentially distancing people from the real and lived experiences, or a deeply personal medium that can evoke powerful memories through its connection to the past? These counterpoints on distancing and intimacy unfold the exact tension of meme images and photography in the contemporary context. Meme images, like photography, are fossils of the present, deprived of specificity, serving as decontextualized images. Meme images become an extension of photography. Not only is the distinction between photography and memes increasingly diminished, but this exact distinction is also reducing both into an interface of communication, in search of a lost time that we have never been in, and an aesthetic form that only resonates with an illusionary past where cultural specificities are largely absent. In the realm of visual culture and production, the cultural effects of the memers and photographers are merely the distortion or rejection of the old ones, instead of creating the new. They are assemblages that are only indexing other ideas.
Maybe the future is lost, as implied by Mark Fisher[5], who believes that the pervasive influence of neoliberal capitalism has led to cultural, political and social stagnation. The future, once imagined as open, progressive, and filled with potential for radical change, has been foreclosed, where, essentially, the idea of a better or different future has been canceled.
Memeticizing Polaroids
Is technostalgia a trap? Here, we are asking the same question that Fisher has asked: is there no alternative to capitalist realism? We still can acknowledge memes and photography as powerful media for resistance. The more luring they are for being manipulated and layered for meaning-making, the more powerful they are as a medium of potential resistance. The tension between preserving, imagining and distributing is growing. Presence caught in a Polaroid photo obtains more than ironing out the folds and creases in the lived experiences. Beyond offering nostalgic solace for the future, it serves as reminders and evidence of what we will ultimately lose — it casts doubt on how we perceive the world around us, our positionalities of the past, and the imminence of our ultimate disappearance.

Proposal with gun/soy sauce
In some cases of remaking, the original memes are violently decontextualized, while the remade memes are radically recontextualized. The nature of memes and the artistic potential of instant photography offer ways of an interchangeable meaning-making process. By creating and removing layers of meanings of what is seen, the images can not only be easily attached to alternative themes like gender performativity and cultural identities, but also denaturalize the forms of Polaroids and memes to create ghostly echoes of the original.

(No) Parody

How to be White?
Filming the making of processes is to some extent a way to potentialize and contextualize viral circulations that took place in memes. Through creating spectacles that depart from the original contexts and grow narratives on their own, the remade memes denaturalize the screen-optimized visual communication, and disambiguate the Polaroid aesthetics by the memes’ very nature of ambiguity.

Consuming Dutch Cuisine
Memes never address how the process unfolds, how the world of others can slip into ours, and how these worlds embody openness to one another. In response to this, the project also comes with a handmade zine. Through touching and feeling the textures of the items in the photo, the audience can sense the tactile memories embodied beyond the surface of images.

Scanned pages of my zine
Meme Rhizome
Is it still possible for new modes of subjectivity? May technostalgia be a trap? If we look closely at Fisher’s theory on hauntology and lost future, we can question his determinist view on culture as Eurocentric. By overly focusing on what could have been, Fisher may unintentionally underplay opportunities for imagining and acting toward new, emergent futures. His focus on melancholic repetition of cultural forms and political stasis may gloss over spaces where innovation and resistance continue.
One way out of this nostalgic trap is to look beyond the parameters of Polaroids and memes, and to allow what appears to be in opposition to one another eventually to encounter and converge. Meme images constitute a flat ontology of becoming and unbecoming through connections, which make their meanings centreless and rhizomatic. They are multiplicities, active, differential, and futile to demarcate. The substance that once contained the meme, whole and signified, now contains the dissolved meme, decomposed and a-signified, but still present and still connected. As assemblages, they produce hazy gestures simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. There is no origin, nor destination. Every memetic Polaroid acts as a monologue but also a new way of relating, one not only speaking for itself but being a part of the other. The memes and meme-rhizome become a museum of accidents and shape sites of encounter of digital circulation and capitalism.

Bio: Xiaoyue Xu is a writer, photographer and research master’s student in Art and Performance Research Studies at University of Amsterdam. She is interested in the interdisciplinarity between human-nonhuman relations, Eastern philosophy and performing arts in relation to artistic research and digital culture.
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[1] Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
[2] Flusser, Vilém. 2014. Gestures. University of Minnesota Press.
[3] Miyake, Esperanza. 2024. Virtual Influencers: Identity and Digitality in the Age of Multiple Realities. 1st ed. London: Routledge.
[4] Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books.
[5] Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. John Hunt Publishing.