In a good example of our foolishness in expecting certain things on the Internet, I just spent close to one hour trying to track down the author of this photo. I like it and, considering the other thousand reblogs on Tumblr, so do many others.

I started by trying to find whoever posted this to Tumblr originally. And I found Tumblr’s ‘notes’ UI could be a bit more useful if it didn’t force users to click through ‘show more’ dozens of times before getting to the ‘patient zero’. I made some stops on a few blogs I found along the way but no sign of any attribution — and again, Tumblr gave no link to the post on each blog, so I often found myself scrolling down until I found it. Dammit, Tumblr: I’ll dust off my API skills and program something to be able to decently track reblogs. I’ll leave it to another day though, as I decided I would get faster results through Google Image Search, and what I wanted was to pay attribution to the damn picture anyway. Not much luck though. The earliest appearances of the image were on Eastern European websites (Russian and what I believe is Lithuanian) three or four years ago, so I’d volunteeer the anonymous photographer is from one of those places (and the snow makes it more plausible than, say, a Trinidadian photographer). But that’s a far as I got. It’s late and I’ll be teaching a class at nine in the morning. I give up.

So, enjoy a photograph by… Presumably Eastern European Anonymous Photographer.