Under the Influence (Colonial Eyes)

"Under the Influence (Colonial Eyes)" is a series of memes made by appropriating 19th-century ethnographic photographs taken by Maurice Vidal Portman of the tribes in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, sourced from the British Museum’s digital archives. 

My paradigm for reading colonial photos is inspired by a line from Scarface: “The eyes, Chico, they never lie.” I have always been drawn to the haunting eyes in these images — eyes that look back at the photographer defiantly. Bell Hooks termed this “The Oppositional Gaze”: a silent look that sees, endures and refuses to look away. 

By inserting these images into a meme format — the quintessential “Networked Image” — I seek to disrupt their promise of a static, objective truth. The meme's malleable nature becomes the conceptual antithesis of the ethnographic image. Through this series, I aim to repurpose the silence existing in a colonial image as a form of enduring resistance.