Andy Baio has posted Meme Scenery, a series of images from which the celebrity has been removed using photoshop or gimp.
Removing the main act from images and videos sheds light on the strange sort of idolatry that pervades the internet. The scene without the actor is a mundane and disturbing place; without a celebrity, it seems like nowhere. The deeper implication is that the internet celebrity is really a nobody that we have artificially built up, perhaps someone we should have just left alone. Jon Haddock used this technique to great effect when he depicted the dim surroundings from amateur photos of sexual acts.
The subject removal technique takes an even more extreme expression when police investigators such as the Toronto Police remove images of victims of horrible abuse from photographs in order to enlist outside help in rescuing them. In these cases of identification by background-recognition, the public thankfully were able to assist the authorities in finding and helping the unknown subjects in the photographs.
