Stock Photo Backstabber

About

Stock Photo Backstabber is a captioned stock photo series in which a man in a suit shakes hands with a woman while a person dressed as a shadow holds a knife to her back.

Origin

On August 24th, 2017, the Twitter ^[1] account @darkstockphotos posted a stock image by Troy Aossey^[2] of a man shaking hands with a woman as a person dressed as shadow holds a knife to her back. The tweet (shown below) received more than 875 retweets and 2,200 likes in five months.

Spread

The earliest known iteration of the meme appeared on Astrology Memes on October 25th, 2017. The post (shown below, left) featurs the image with the captions "Me" on the man, "Opporutnity for Happiness" on the woman" and "Crippling Depression" on the shadow. Several months later, on January 5th, the image was posted to the helloiamdepressed Tumblr ^[4] account, where it received more than 330 notes in six days.

Five days later, Redditor ^[5] mynemejeffmynenejeff posted a variation on the /r/dankmemes subreddit. This version featured the caption "The internet" on the man, "every meme of 2018 so far" on the woman and "Meme Overuse" on the shadow. In addition, Logan Paul, Tide PODS and Ugandan Knuckles were photoshopped on the woman. The post (shown below, center) received more than 1,800 points (97% upvoted) and 80 comments in less than 24 hours.

On January 11th, Redditor^[6] AliceTheGamedev posted about the stock photo in the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit. The post received more than 890 points (95% upvoted) and 30 comments. The same Redditor posted a variation with the caption "feature creep" on the shadown (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not Available.

External References