Outer frame reads:

"The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. It is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, contemplation into distraction.

Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images—their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement. The poor image takes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, zines, and nonconformist materials, which aesthetically used poor materials.

The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality." — remix after Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)