We Tripped El Hadji Diouf

We Tripped El Hadji Diouf: The Story of a Photoshop Thread

We Tripped El Hadji Diouf GIF

On February 5, 2011, T. Finn, a member of the website Something Awful, posted a doctored animated GIF of Senegalese soccer player El Hadji Diouf being clobbered by an invisible opponent. His challenge to those with image-editing skills was simple: modify the GIF to imagine what tripped El Hadji Diouf. Over the next several weeks, more than a hundred remixed animated GIFs poured in. The cumulative result was one of the Web’s most “epic” Photoshop threads, highlighting the ease of moving image manipulation and its proliferation as a natural extension of everyday online communication.

We Tripped El Hadji Diouf presents the most surprising, clever, and imaginative responses. These GIFs were not created with commercial intentions or claims to fine art. Instead, their makers were using widely available image-editing tools to participate in a humorous visual conversation and to engage in playful one-upmanship.

Organized by Jason Eppink, Associate Curator of Digital Media, Museum of the Moving Image

We Tripped El Hadji Diouf is on display at the National Football Museum from June 15 2015 until September 2015.