I took a photo and it became a meme
OK, before we get into this, let me be as transparent as possible.
I wasn’t the original snapper behind Bad Luck Brian or Scumbag Steve, and I wasn’t the first person to capture the hover hand on film. They won’t be hanging my portrait in the Dank Meme Photographers’ Hall of Fame anytime soon. (Does such a place exist? If there’s a God, it should.)
In fact, if memes were NBA players, mine would be a high school baller who twisted his ankle while taking his first attempted jumpshot and never played again.
But let it be known: once upon a time, I took a photo, and it became a meme.
Let me set the scene for you. It was a typical winter’s day in sub-tropical Brisbane (the 1st of June, 2015 to be exact); that is, clear blue skies and humidity levels akin to a Canadian summer. I was walking the streets of a relatively quiet CBD, minding my own business, unknowingly about to create meme history. It was that time of a weekday where the morning coffee rush has already died down, but the lunch rush hasn’t quite started yet, and people are actually indoors working (sometime between 10:31 and 10:59, I’ll bet).
Call it fate, call it serendipity, call it destiny, but I arrived at the pedestrian crossing at the corner of Ann and Edward streets just as the little man (person?) had turned red. Which meant I had to stop. As I stood there on the quiet corner, waiting for my little green friend to appear, I had cause to turn my head to the left, only to see…
As an ex-journalist (and compulsive Twitter over-sharer), I somehow felt compelled to slap a big, dirty, obnoxiously capitalised #BREAKING on the front of my tweet, as I recorded this moment for the ages.
It seems the worldwide media love a good #BREAKING hashtag, because my smartphone soon began beeping like R2D2 as the myriad likes, retweets and comments started streaming in one by one. (Granted, it was a fraction of the tweets Kendall Jenner might get if she tweeted a half-hearted “Good morning” to her 24.8 million followers, but for me it was an unanticipated outpouring of human interest in my otherwise underappreciated, underloved tweetstream.)
It didn’t stop there. Soon the DMs started flowing, from international news agencies asking if I’d recorded any video of what was soon to be known as “The Great IBM Fire of 2015” (kidding). Of course, I hadn’t. The local TV networks and newspapers also came calling, asking if they could use my pic with a photographer credit; of course, I obliged. And others — I’m looking at you, Brisbane Times — used my iPhone snap without permission. But hey, that’s the internet.
But what came next… well, that was my brief, shining moment in the warm sunshine of meme-dom. Because soon jokes started to flow:
(There was also this one, which I like to think my photo inspired:)
Great gags, the lot of them. As a father of four, I appreciate a good dad joke as much as the next guy. But this one, published for posterity by the Sydney Morning Herald (again without attribution), was the best:
A picture may tell a thousand words, but those three little syllables do a pretty good job as well. Who was this genius marrying his/her comedic poetry to my imagery, creating a union made in dank meme heaven? We may never know.
Obviously, as a seasoned veteran of all things meme, I have some amazing insights to share for any hopeful who fancies themselves as the photographer behind the next Stoner Stanley:
- If in doubt, just take that photo. It may never become a meme. But to paraphrase the great Wayne Gretzky, you miss 100% of the meme potential of the photos you don’t take!
- A meme is bigger than any one person. You may have taken the photo, but a meme belongs to the world. And only by putting it out into the world, will your photo become a meme! It’s humour crowdsourcing in action.
I may never take a meme-worthy photo again. But I’m proud to say that on one shining June day in 2015, I contributed to the culture. And I’m even prouder to say that my meme is cruelty-free: reports indicate that no IBM workers were injured in its creation.
