The Heat and the Feed

Berlin in July does something specific to the air—thickens it, slows everyone down, makes the whole city feel like it’s running on reduced power. That summer I spent a lot of afternoons online, building up a feed on FFFFOUND, the image-bookmarking platform that was at the time the best way I knew to collect visual material: party shots from The Cobra Snake, photo blogs found through other photo blogs, the slightly overexposed aesthetic of 2009 where every party looked like the best party anyone had ever attended.

There was something genuinely pleasurable about that kind of curation—finding images by actually going looking, before recommendation algorithms started doing the work for you. The effort gave things weight. You ended up with a collection that was actually yours, not a reflection of what everyone else was already clicking on.

I don’t know that any of it amounted to anything. But it kept me off the streets through a lot of hot, sweaty afternoons, and some of those images stayed with me longer than most of what I read that year.