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.
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.
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.
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.
Epistemic Maneuvering
(S) — 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.
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.
See also: Data-bending; Ostranenie
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.
See also: Grid; Interpellation; Racializing Surveillance Capitalism
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.
See also: Outstanding Universal Value; Spectatorial agency; Worlding; Frame
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.
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. In photographic practice, this term marks the tension between monumental visibility and minor resistance.
See also: Palimpsest; 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
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; Archive
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.
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.
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.