Viral photograph trends bubbled and burped in the middle age of the internet, that in-between time, somewhere between 2004 and 2014, where the internet existed in a purgatory of wide dissemination and innocent engagement. 2011’s viral trend ‘Planking’ was perhaps the most popular of all its siblings, probably because of its proximity to death. Planking involved making your body rigid, like a plank, laying atop something you shouldn’t, and taking a picture. Planking is the pose (the smile), exploded in a networked context. 

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The plank embodies the absurdity of how the camera captures movement; its sub-second freezing of time, rendering fluid movement as uncanny rigidity. This visually repeatable and recognisable feature of photographs was doubled by planks in absurd and unnatural locations critiquing the image’s perpetual claim to the real by reproducing some of its distinctive and dissociative visual features in absurdity. Planking images seem to promote a critical engagement with the formal photograph.

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Most viral photographic trends appear to involve highlighting a technical or aesthetic feature of the image and reproducing it in irony and absurdity. ‘Leisure diving’, ‘Horsemaning’, ‘Moneyface’, ‘Vadering’, ‘Babybugging’, and hundreds of other ‘ing’ suffixed photo trends, which stretch the limit of any definition of ‘viral trend’ (very few of these photo fads ever reach virality), all perform the photograph in different ways. Focusing on frames and the limited perception of the camera as in ‘moneyface’, for example, or as in ‘stocking’; re-staging existent photographs to reperform an absurd image.(2)

 

The ‘Lynndie Pose’, named for Lynndie England (one of the most famous and most vilified soldiers at Abu Ghraib) is perhaps the first viral photographic trend. The Lynndie Pose reproduces one of the most recognisable images from Abu Ghraib, in which England poses next to a lineup of hooded and naked detainees, one of whom is being forced to masturbate. Unlike later viral trends, the Lynndie pose has a very clear source; the ironic ‘Badgas’ blog in 2004, and at that source a manifesto for how to pose correctly, 

 

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The pose here is embodied with absurd clarity, ‘Face the camera’, ‘tilt’, ‘lean back’, and ‘keep your left arm slightly bent’. Lynndie posing seems to demonstrate an acknowledgement of the pose within the image as the key factor that assigns the Abu Ghraib images their spectacle and cultural penetration.

 

As a Lynndie pose is shared and performed and shared again, it begins to gain internal layers. A ‘Lynndie pose’ is set in constant response to other Lynndie poses within the network. This inter-relationship allows the Lynndie Pose to progressively visually evolve whilst remaining linked to an original expression. As this process replicates, unfurls, and reperforms in the network the ‘victim', focused on in the ‘Badgas’ blog, becomes inanimate. ‘Doing a Lynndie’ overtakes ‘being Lynndied’; thanksgiving grills are Lynndied, hotdogs, and turtles underwater.(3) In the refined Lynndie, only the performed pose remains essential. With visual mutation and ‘innovation’ the pose, now sublimated into a wider consciousness, morphs further. In its third iteration the pose and the pose alone has been refined and repeated to such an extent that it begins to be enacted on unsuspecting bodies by the camera. People (and cats, babies, trees) unknowingly doing the ‘Lynndie pose’ which now moves through the lens of the camera like a spectre on unsuspecting bodies and objects. We see a honing in on the essence of the original Abu Ghraib images from a Western audience's perspective as the pose replicates in the network. The refinement of the Lynndie pose suggests images from Abu Ghraib did not become icons because they are images of torture, torture can be replaced and spoken for by grills and cats. They became icons because of the pose.

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The pose, in particular the smile, is familiar territory to the analogue camera. The Lynndie pose, however, is not simply a smile. Rather, it and other viral social media trends are specifically digital events that depend on an image’s constant existence amongst other images. Lynndie posing demonstrates that the existence of the image within the network fundamentally changes the content of, and subject’s relationship to, the photograph. 

 

A Lynndie poser, as they position themselves for the camera, situates themselves within three main image cultures:

1. The source; the original image of Lynndie England posing next to torture.

2. The visual feed of an abstract audience that they situate themselves alongside by posing; other Lynndie posers.

3. The poser’s own network; people they share images with online, where the Lynndie pose exits in a feed alongside baby and dog pictures.

 

A Lynndie poser positions themselves within a network of images, directly aligning their body to a visual culture of images that exist alongside each other. The Lynndie pose can only function and develop within this culture of other images. In this and other viral photo trends, there is an embodied self-awareness of being photographed and the density of the afterlives and after-viewers of the image in both photographer and subject. When photographed, the subject morphs their body to refer outside the image and become a lens looking back upon it, positioning themselves as a referential object with an audience and a large group of images. The photographed presents a simultaneous embodied awareness of the singular image about to be captured, and the potential images that exist before and after it within the network. The poser in the viral pose comes to embody the specific logic of the networked image physically.

 

The network complicates posing precisely because it is a network that relates poses to consciously embodied and specific visual traditions. In this complexity a new form of posing is born, the viral pose, that fundamentally embodies how the image exists in the moment and afterwards. In this deeper embodiment of the image within the pose, in this situated stance which looks directly at the digitally networked image, the pose and the act of posing begins to deconstruct the photograph itself and in particular the photograph’s claims to the real. The Lynndie poser, intentionally or not, acknowledges that every digital photograph is inextricably connected to and informed by other images, and therefore by artifice, by the photograph itself, and by formal concerns, not by the real. 

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‘Wrongfully posing for a photograph’ is one of the charges Lynndie England was found guilty of by the US Army.(4) Within its clunky language and vague terminology, this charge holds the contemporary expression of the Lynndie pose. If you search Facebook or Instagram for ‘Lynndie England pose’, the most recent results displayed are not people making ‘a hitchhiking gesture with your right hand’, as the ‘Badgas’ blog instructed earlier posers. Rather, you will see images of people generically and sincerely posing captioned with ‘wrongfully posing for a photograph - Lynndie England’. 

 

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