Impulse

People’s response to my pic­tures always sur­prises me. Sometimes, I’ll take a pic­ture that just blows me a way, but nobody else will get it. Other times, some image I’d pass over is adored by every­one who sees it. Here on the inter­net, things are even wack­ier.
I’ve been snoop­ing around my server logs to see what poe­ple find inter­est­ing. Last month, this pic­ture from my Tuileries port­fo­lio hot. No less than five blogs fea­tured this photo as their back­ground image (1 2 3 4 5). The blog­gers were almost all teens or early 20-somethings, rang­ing in loca­tion from New York and New Jersey, to way out west in Bakersfield.

Of course the inter­est­ing ques­tion is: why do they like it so much? Of all the pho­tos on my gallery site, this is the last photo I would’ve guessed teens would respond to. Maybe it’s the wist­ful­ness of it? Who knows? But: teen fash­ion is fickle. All but one of the blogs have switched to another photo and this image has returned to quiet obscu­rity.
The hot image this month appears to be “Young Love” which I posted to this blog in May. For some rea­son, it’s hit count has gone through the roof; eas­ily dou­ble that of any other blog entry. Two blogs have picked it up (1 2). It’s the most fre­quently vis­ited photo I have on Flickr. This one’s pop­u­lar­ity I under­stand — cute works. Now why cute took six months to start work­ing, I don’t know, but it’s work­ing now.
Maybe it’s all google’s fault, and the true expla­na­tion is known only to some min­ion deep in the bow­els of the Googleplex. After all, these pho­tos are now show­ing up in the first few items on Google Images searches for “mod­ern pho­tog­ra­phy” and “young love”.
Whatever the rea­son, I am still thor­oughly enter­tained watch­ing to see which pieces peo­ple respond to.
How about you? What’s your favorite picture?