The grown-up word for the central skill is recontextualising: putting an existing image into a new context so it says something it never said before. Con-text literally means "the stuff around the text" — the setting, the words next to it, the place you meet it. Change the surroundings and you change the message, even if the picture itself stays untouched.
The Four Moves
Quoting is borrowing a recognisable chunk and dropping it whole into your own work, the way you'd quote someone in an essay — we're meant to spot it. Sampling (the word comes from music) is lifting a fragment and looping or reusing it as a building block. Reframing is changing what surrounds the image — the literal frame, the background, the gallery wall versus the supermarket aisle — so we read it differently. Re-captioning is changing the words attached to it: a new title, a new caption, a new label can completely rewrite what we think we're looking at.
Picture a plain photo of a smiling family at dinner. Caption it "Sunday roast" and it's wholesome. Caption it "the last meal before the move" and your chest tightens. Same pixels — different sentence. That's the whole craft in miniature.
Why This Is More Than Decoration
The reason recontextualising counts as making and not just moving is that the new context carries an idea. A good appropriation has something to say — a joke, a question, a criticism, a feeling — and the borrowed image is the quickest way to say it, because it arrives loaded with everything we already think about it. You're borrowing not just the picture but all its baggage, and then redirecting that baggage at your own target.
In the toy, keep the stock image fixed and cycle through the frames and captions. Notice you never touch the image, yet the meaning lurches every time. The skill isn't drawing — it's aiming.