A few years ago I created a now-defunct Tumblr for the purpose of posting vintage photographs. I mostly liked mid-century color photos of American family life. A snapshot of someone’s sunburned dad leaning against a wooden railing at the edge of the Grand Canyon was a shoe-in as long as the photo brandished the distinctively subdued patina of 1960s Kodachrome.
By design, Tumblr lends itself to digital image collecting, allowing users to easily locate and archive images they find beautiful, compelling, funny and resonant. As a result it hosts many blogs like this, essentially online scrapbooks of other people’s memories and experiences. It’s a versatile platform, and there are definitely other ways to use it — some people, for example, use it as a primarily text-based confessional medium, like Livejournal. But most bloggers use Tumblr to cull images of interest from the far reaches of the internet, communicating their aesthetic sensibilities through photographs taken by others.
This type of photoblogging is a matter of identity formation, as it ultimately constitutes an exercise in taste (as Pierre Bourdieu says, “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”). In contrast to the logic of Facebook, which is all about literal self-documentation, the practice looks outward for the digital materials that in social media come to represent the self. Things that would seem tacky or confusing on Facebook — posting lots of pictures of places you’ve never been to, people you don’t know, clothes and goods you don’t own — are par for the course on Tumblr. It follows that Facebook and Tumblr are engaged in two different projects of self-representation, the former emphasizing lived experience and the latter emphasizing cultural awareness.
Once the images start doing this symbolic work, the actual conditions of their production become extraneous. The identity of the man in the Grand Canyon picture, for example, is unimportant to Tumblr’s vintage photo bloggers — if anything, his anonymity contributes to the image’s appeal. The case of vintage photography on Tumblr calls to mind Arjun Appadurai’s “ersatz nostalgia,” where “the viewer need only bring the faculty of nostalgia to an image that will supply the memory of a loss he or she has never suffered.” Digitally reproduced vintage photos are representations of a communal rather than an individual past, and since the past can never be fully recovered they are therefore also articulations of a communal loss. This shared pastness and lostness are the focal points for Tumblr’s vintage photo bloggers. The provenance of the images becomes irrelevant, supplanted by an emphasis on affect.
Tumblr’s logic of representation applies to contemporary photos, too. Images of tattoos, bicycles, subway graffiti, glistening cannabis buds and perfectly swirled ice cream cones covered in sprinkles are ubiquitous. To reblog any of these is, for the average Tumblr user, to establish affinity with an implied group. Many photos on Tumblr are not even credited, because to digital image collectors it simply doesn’t matter where the pictures of crumbling buildings and heart-shaped pastries and brightly colored sneakers are from, or what material reality they document. On Tumblr they become communal property, emblematic of subcultural affiliations, aesthetic orientations, social locations, and ideological dispositions.
Because of Tumblr’s unique insistence on the socially symbolic rather than the literally representative function of images, it can provide uncommon insight into the relationships of certain types of iconography to group identity. For example, following Appadurai we have to wonder what communal loss lends the Grand Canyon picture its allure for Tumblr bloggers. We might choose a concept like family vacation as an entry point, which would then point us toward nostalgic abstractions like nuclear family, childhood, leisure, and mid-century middle-class America. Thanks to Tumblr, we would suddenly find ourselves laying the foundation for an interesting critique.
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