A performative glossary for decolonial image-making.
Neo Lexicon: Photographic Vernacular is an evolving glossary of terms that reframe how we speak about images, place, and power. Situated at the intersection of critical theory, visual culture, and site-responsive practice, this series proposes a working vocabulary for photographic thinking—one that resists disciplinary closure and colonial taxonomies. Each entry offers a concept-in-progress: a term drawn from, or invented within, my own practice that names something latent, liminal, or unspoken in the photographic encounter. This introductory post outlines the full lexicon-in-formation. Going forward, each month will feature a deep dive into one term—expanding its critical, poetic, and practical dimensions through writing, images, and contextual reflection.
Legend:
(NS) — Neologism or Strategic Reappropriation
(S) — Style or Aesthetic Strategy
(T) — Theoretical or Conceptual Framework
Archive
(T) — Not merely a repository of objects or documents, but a system of power that governs memory, visibility, and historical legitimacy. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion of the cultural archive—the body of knowledge, assumptions, and imagery through which Empire came to understand, represent, and dominate the colonized world—the archive is refigured here as a colonial technology that structures what can be known, who is remembered, and how history is visualized. It is less a neutral vault and more a performative apparatus of classification, exclusion, and ideological opacity.
In photographic contexts, the archive becomes both medium and battleground: it is where the imperial gaze is recorded, and where counter-visual strategies may intervene. To engage the archive decolonially is to rupture its coherence, trace its omissions, and reimagine its contents through tactics like détournement, ré-collage, and unflattening.
Use in practice: Remixing ethnographic photo archives with street art to challenge colonial representations; exhibiting redacted government documents alongside vernacular family portraits to confront carceral state logics.
See also: Cultural Memory; Palimpsest; Outstanding Universal Value; Epistemic Maneuvering; Interpellation
Dé-collage
(NS) — From the French décoller, “to unstick.” In contrast to montage’s additive logic, dé- collage implies subtraction, fragmentation, and the rupture of representational surfaces. This technique peels back the visible layers of the image to reveal the structural violences beneath. It aligns with post-representational photographic strategies that resist visual wholeness, coherence, or resolution.
Use in practice: A layered photograph printed on torn billboard paper; removing emulsion from a photo print to reveal substrate material.
See also: Glitch; Unflattening; Palimpsest
Duonotative
(NS) — A neologism combining “dual” and “denotative,” this term names an image’s ability to produce contradictory readings simultaneously. Rooted in Roland Barthes’ distinction between denotation and connotation but recast through a decolonial and para-Fanonian lens, the duonotative image coexists in paradox — at once transparent and opaque, innocent and incriminating, visible and illegible. These images embody the tensions of colonial visibility regimes.
Use in practice: A single photograph that functions as both surveillance and self-portrait; or both tourist documentation and ethnographic extract.
Epistemic Maneuvering
(T) — A strategy through which dominant institutions shape what counts as knowledge, often to maintain power, erase alternatives, or naturalize colonial logics. This maneuvering occurs through selective framing, omission, aestheticization, or recontextualization — such as curatorial practices, photographic cropping, and institutional archiving. By positioning certain narratives as objective and others as illegible, epistemic maneuvering regulates visibility, authority, and belief.
Use in practice: A photographic archive that privileges settler documents while omitting Indigenous counter-archives; an exhibition framing protest as disorder rather than resistance.
See also: Interpellation; Imperial Screen; Mise-en-dispossession
Glitch
(S) — A rupture in the system, once seen as technical error, now reimagined as strategy. Informed by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, Safiya Noble’s work on algorithmic bias, and Nick Briz’s hypermedia essay Thoughts on Glitch[Art] v2.0, the glitch refuses resolution and embraces opacity. Within decolonial visuality, it becomes an act of resistance against the disciplining of digital aesthetics and the epistemological violence of clarity.
Use in practice: Corrupted image files, datamoshed video stills, pixelated portraiture used to obscure identity.
See also: Data-bending; Ostranenie
Ideological Opacity
(T) — In visual and photographic practices, ideological opacity masks the constructedness of meaning and authority, making critique and resistance more difficult.
Use in practice: A photographic series that documents urban surveillance architecture as “modern design” rather than mechanisms of control; museum exhibits that omit colonial histories, producing an uncritical aesthetic of heritage.
See also: Imperial Screen; Epistemic Maneuvering; Detournement; Palimpsest
Imperial Screen
(T) — Coined and elaborated by Nicholas Mirzoeff, the “Imperial Screen” refers to the totalizing visual regime that mediates colonial power through dominant representational systems — cartography, cinema, surveillance, the rasterized image, and more. The screen occludes, disciplines, and governs perception through a white-supremacist, extractivist optic.
Use in practice: Screens as both literal (drones, kill boxes, raster images) and conceptual (perspective systems, museum displays, news cycles).
See also: Grid; Interpellation; Racializing Surveillance Capitalism
Interpellation
(T) — The mechanism that produces subjects in such a way that they recognize their own existence in terms of the dominant ideology of the society in which they live (Althusser, 1970). For Situationist thinkers, interpellation is tied to the Spectacle: subjects are hailed by images, signs, and stereotypes offering universal positions they are meant to occupy. The function of interpellation is to block spontaneous creativity.
See also: Imperial Screen; Society of the Spectacle
Mise-en-dispossession
(NS) — A critical reworking of mise-en-scène that foregrounds the spatial politics of display, curation, and framing under conditions of coloniality. Rather than simply denoting the arrangement of visual elements within a frame, mise-en-dispossession names the structural act of cultural erasure through aesthetic presentation. It exposes how beauty can be weaponized — how visual orderings often serve to pacify, possess, or aestheticize violence. In photographic practice, this concept interrogates the colonial grammar of the image: what is shown, what is excluded, and how dispossession is naturalized through composition.
Use in practice: Framing indigenous land as empty landscape; aestheticizing ruins of colonial architecture without historical context; curated images that romanticize displacement.
See also: Outstanding Universal Value; Spectatorial agency; Worlding; Frame
Navigating Space
(T) — The embodied, situated, and relational strategies used by individuals to traverse, resist, and re-script spaces organized by power. In the context of photographic practice, navigating space refers to both the physical act of moving through geographies (urban, virtual, archival) and the epistemic maneuvering required to subvert spatialized ideologies.
Use in practice: Community mapping, site-responsive photography, counter-cartographic installations.
See also: Grid
Ostranenie
(T) — From the Russian Formalist tradition, meaning “to make strange.” This tactic of defamiliarization recasts the familiar as strange in order to disrupt uncritical seeing. Reimagined here for photographic practice, ostranenie exposes the constructedness of the image, particularly in genres like ethnography or documentary, where neutrality is often assumed.
Use in practice: Decontextualized street photography that reorients urban vernacular; image-text pairings that dislocate meaning.
See also: Glitch; Ré-collage
Outstanding Universal Value
(NS) — A UNESCO term used to determine World Heritage Sites. In this lexicon, the phrase becomes a metaphor for the imperial scaffolding of cultural memory and aesthetic legitimacy. It signals the erasure of contested, vernacular, or subaltern narratives beneath global recognition. Inphotographic practice, this term marks the tension between monumental visibility and minor resistance.
Related project: Outstanding Universal Value (2024), a photo series engaging Puebla’s historic centre as both world heritage site and site of colonial trauma.
See also: Palimpsest; Archive
Palimpsest
(T) — Traditionally a manuscript erased and overwritten, still bearing ghost traces of earlier text. Within this glossary, the palimpsest denotes images, places, and archives that hold sedimented histories — resisting temporal linearity and revealing the stratified logics of colonization. Particularly salient in urban contexts where colonial infrastructures persist beneath the surface.
Use in practice: Layering 19th-century photographs with contemporary images of the same site; hybrid maps combining historical cartography with present-day satellite imagery.
See also: Dé-collage; Unflattening; Archive
Racializing Surveillance Capitalism
(T) — Coined through the work of scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this term captures how surveillance technologies and data economies disproportionately target racialized populations. In photography, it points to practices that resist biometric capture and image profiling.
See also: Imperial Screen; Interpellation; Glitch
Ré-collage
(NS) — A neologism developed in this lexicon to describe the stratigraphic layering of street art and imagery recontextualized within the camera frame and finalized as photographic print. To ré-collage is to document, archive, and reassemble urban visuality in a manner that disrupts its ideological opacity.
Use in practice: Mass collection and rearrangement of street art photography to expose visual regimes of control and countervisualities of resistance.
See also: Photo Lexicon: Street Art; Palimpsest; Dé-collage
Retinotextuality
(NS) — A newly coined term fusing “retinal” and “textuality,” used to describe the dynamic entanglement of image and interpretation in photographic practice. Retinotextuality identifies how photographs operate as visual-textual objects, calling attention to how images are read, misread, and co-authored by spectators within ideological frames. It bridges ocular and conceptual reception, destabilising the image as self-contained evidence.
Use in practice: Caption-image dissonance; viewer annotations inscribed onto image prints; conflicting readings emerging from the same visual frame.
See also: Reader-response Theory; Duonotative; Spectatorial agency
Systems (Image Making)
(T) — Refers to the institutional, aesthetic, and ideological frameworks that organize image production and circulation. Systems create visual taxonomies, distribute legibility, and often replicate hegemonic narratives. Image-making systems include the camera, the archive, the museum, and the media apparatus.
See also: Grid; Interpellation; Spectacle
Tactics (Image Breaking)
(T) — Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics, this term refers to the ephemeral, subversive, and often unsanctioned interventions in dominant visual systems. Tactics rupture the spectacle, break frames, and operate through appropriation, parody, détournement.
Use in practice: Street art, glitching, image defacement, reverse surveillance.
See also: Ostranenie; Ré-collage; Glitch
Worlding
(T) — A term that signifies the active process of shaping, narrating, and legitimating a version of the world. In photographic practice, worlding reveals how images don’t just depict the world — they construct it, frame it, and circulate it through regimes of value and visibility.
Worlding is never neutral. It is always entangled with race, extraction, and epistemic maneuvering. UNESCO’s designation of “Outstanding Universal Value” is a paradigmatic instance: it codifies global recognition while often effacing vernacular histories. Counter-worlding, by contrast, resists this totalizing grid — often through strategies like détournement, re-inscription, and spectral layering.
Use in practice: A photographic intervention in a World Heritage Site that reveals erased Indigenous geographies; documenting street art as insurgent cartographies against gentrification-driven reworlding.
See also: Archive; Outstanding Universal Value; Epistemic Maneuvering; Palimpsest
References
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 1983.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” 1970.• Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Hill and Wang, 1977.
Briz, Nick. Thoughts on Glitch[Art] v2.0. 2015, https://nickbriz.com/thoughtsonglitchart/.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1952.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, 1972.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “The Strike Against Whiteness.”
Guevara, Francisco. Disguised Presence: Inventing Mexico as Monumental Spectacle in the National Museum of Anthropology.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. MIT Press, 2023.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression. NYU Press, 2018.
Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2020.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Harvard University Press, 2015.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. 1967.