Heya. In the spirit of sharing, I thought I'd repost part of a notice from my soon-to-be-defunct Tumblr blog, namely from today, 3 December 2018.
Also in that spirit, look above upon my most reblogged (and most often unattributed and/or manipulated) picture from said soon-to-be-defunct platform. This is στοργή #2, featuring Dandy and Dylan C, taken in PDX almost five years ago to the very day and almost as old as the very Tumblr page itself. Lots of repetition here, I know. But the point is, the coincidences abound.
In the end, I had 7,265 people tuning into @mkulischphoto on Tumblr. I'm not really sure why. (But it was the butts, let's be honest...) After five long years on the platform, sharing work and getting feedback—and following a fair number of artists there myself—I have decided to say goodbye and leave Tumblr for good. The why cannot be ignored.
On 3 December 2018, and in response to their removal from the iOS App Store, the Tumblr Staff announced a move to eliminate “adult content” on their platform. Overnight, 80% of my posts were flagged for deletion—many of them not showing nudity at all. For a platform claiming to invest in “art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality,” Tumblr has spectacularly failed to protect its supposed values. And this isn’t the first time it’s failed. Their move was motivated, as I've come to expect from Yahoo in particular (hi Flickr!) and tech giants in general, purely out of self-interest and self-preservation. Corporations are no trustworthy arbiters of culture or conversation.
I’ll be completely deleting my Tumblr page on 17 December 2018, when their new community guidelines go into effect. I've already removed my content. And I'll be updating this site (and my other platforms) to remove any mention of Tumblr in the meantime...
If you want to continue to see content that would get you Tumblr-banned in future, I suggest you pledge on my Patreon page. Of course, my website will get updates occasionally, but nothing so regular as there. And you cannot trust Instagram—which already has a restrictive nudity policy, that ends up targeting LGBTQ artists—to not eventually follow suit. It is the way of these things.
Some of you visitors here came to me from Tumblr. If you’re among them, know I’ll always be grateful. I read in a novel once that you’re not really an artist unless you show your work. I’m not sure I agree with that. But the Tumblr community encouraged me to share my pictures before I really knew what I was doing. It was a place to try new things, find inspiration, and even study photographers better than myself—and I learned (as a poet) how important it is to study your betters. You're my betters, you supporters who make it possible to continue doing this work.
While I'm not expecting any new upchucks in Patreon growth, or frankly to my blog subscribers here, as pretty much all new folks came to me from Tumblr, I'm grateful for those of you who came and stayed. It's hard finding places to share all of my work. Harder still to make those places last.
Let me know what I can do to keep you.