That Merkel Photo Is More Like a Meme Than a Renaissance Painting

I find it interesting that it was Merkel's pic that went viral and none that Trump/white House put out--even with all the prepared orchestration. chuckle



That Merkel Photo Is More Like a Meme Than a Renaissance Painting

The viral image from the G7 summit is powerful, but it also resembles something mundane: Yanny vs. Laurel.
An Xiao Mina


Jun 11, 2018

?mod=1528715398

This striking photograph, of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel leaning toward President Donald Trump during the G7 meeting in Quebec, quickly became a meme.Jesco Denzel / Handout / Reuters

What do you see in the now-famous photograph of Angela Merkel and Donald Trump at the G7 Summit? Perhaps you see a woman leader, in a room full of men, scolding a petty man refusing to cooperate. You might see a bold U.S. president patriotically defying those who would stand in the way of what’s best for the United States. You might see one more indicator of the West’s decline as a unified political force.



Most importantly, what you saw, whatever it was, is part of a larger trend: Geopolitical contention is frequently expressed through the language of online visual media. Merkel’s team, which posted the photo to Instagram, offered a generally staid description—“spontaneous meeting between two working sessions”—but the image jumped out for its composition, soft ambient lighting, and what seemed like an incredible moment of contention.

The relative absence of context—there's no telling from the photo what Merkel was saying, for example—is part of what made it so ready to become memetic. The image easily serves as a sort of Rorschach test for our political moment, open to interpretation by anyone, including many with competing agendas and narratives. A number of folks online observed that Trump looked like a defiant child, and Merkel stood in a dominant position. Not everyone saw it that way, of course. National-Security Adviser John Bolton posted the exact image, noting that “other countries expect America will always be their bank.”


Meanwhile, the People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, posted the same photograph in contrast with a photo from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit. The SCO photo showed Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and others walking in unity.

The German newspaper Die Welt posted the same photo, describing it as “the moment that broke the West.” Belgium’s former Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt used it as an opportunity to recall the ongoing Mueller investigation and the President’s tweeting habits....................................