The Best Tumblrs Had a Dirty Mouth

Around 2009, Tumblr was the best place on the internet to find a certain kind of image. Not institutional museum photography, not stock, not DeviantArt’s earnest hobbyist chaos or Flickr’s camera-club energy—something else. People who had an eye and no agenda beyond sharing what they’d collected, reblogging each other in long chains until a single photograph had traveled through fifty blogs and accumulated a small mythology. The platform ran on image curation the way Twitter ran on snark, and the best curators were quietly, obsessively good at it.

The taxonomy was rough but honest. Half the best blogs started with "Fuck Yeah"—Fuck Yeah Pretty Women, Fuck Yeah Skinny Bitch, Fuck Yeah Haggard Sluts—which told you exactly what you were in for and didn’t pretend otherwise. The rest had names like Dead Girls or A Home for Ghosts or Little Ballerina, which told you a different kind of truth about whoever was running them. Girls who’d developed taste before they’d developed context, mostly. The images they gathered were beautiful and sometimes disturbing and often both at once, and you couldn’t always tell which was which.

I found most of this while helping a friend look for interesting photo series online. We went looking for one thing and surfaced three hours later with something we didn’t know we needed—which is what Tumblr did at its peak. Most of those blogs are gone now, the photographs scattered to hard drives or simply deleted. The "Fuck Yeah" taxonomy lives on as internet folklore, which I suppose is its own kind of monument.