We work exclusively on advertisement photography for microstock agencies as I explained before, so the origin of this picture was purely for work reasons. Here’s Guillem ‘s story of how this particular photo came about: “As you can imagine, we can’t worry about each one of the particular uses that have been given to our photos, as we focus on creating content that can be sold thousands of times, even though the meme situation can be surprising.”

“I never thought that one of my images would be this popular,” Guillem says in an email to PetaPixel.

The photographer was surprised by how his photo became a viral sensation - he didn’t know about it (and didn’t even know what a meme was) before his models saw the meme on social media and brought it to his attention. It’s titled “ Girlfriend discovering that her boyfriend is cheating with her best friend at home“: Here’s another stock photo with the same couple and the same theme. Guillem says his best-selling photos are currently being purchased over 6,000 times every year, and this meme photo doesn’t rank among his most popular work - it sells about 700 times a year.

“3 years and a half after we started, we were selling 1,600 photos a day.” “We are one of the top sellers microstock photographers in the world,” Guillem says.

Look over the shoulder meme