In idle moments I have recently found myself delving into the midden of meme that is Tumblr, thanks to a website which extracts just the pictures and presents them as an unending scroll. There is a heavy adolescent bias and pop-culture, films, porn (some NSFW by the way) and cute animals prevail along with a lot of Japanese stuff, perhaps because the site is Japan based. Of such detritus are middens made I guess, but it's pretty fascinating to see what images are making up the mix, it's like watching a ticker-tape of visual culture, and it just keeps rolling. What can we discover from sifting through the thousands and thousands of images, presented without context or caption? Sex, food, celebrity and kittens are obviously important to people on Tumblr because there's a lot of that stuff here but more generally you can see that the still image has lost none of it's power to affect. Amongst the manga and film gifs there is a good smattering of great photography, you might find a Salgado photograph next to a camera-phone image of an overstuffed burrito, or a Cartier-Bresson classic beside a chimp hugging a puppy. I find this rather uplifting, it seems to me a testament to the power of photography that these works are still part of the collective visual archive.
