…to wit, a mind formed for the task by decades of experience, that of Bacchus of ErosBlog.

If you’re like me, you find yourself frequently enchanted by the gorgeous parade of erotic imagery that spills forth all over the Internet, yet often puzzled, vexed even, when confronting some especially appealing image that seems to completely lack provenance. It sits there in cyberspace, titillating you and raising questions: “Who created this?” “What was its original context or meaning?” and of course the all-important “And where can I find more like it?” There are a lot of image-search tools in the world, Google and Tineye and so forth, but there’s still something formidable about having a human being — a human being with a highly-developed erotic consciousness and an ability to identify with those of fellow human beings — look into matters.

So it was with delight to discover that one of my oldest of old friends in the world of erotic image blogging, pretty much the guy who gave me a start in the business of content creation, has started up a service to do exactly this. For a mere five dollars (U.S.) Bacchus will set his formidable skills to work researching any erotic image you want, and return a report on its provenance. Count me a satisfied customer already. I had to give his service a whirl (it didn’t hurt that the service had already been given a shout-out by big-league sex blogger Violet Blue), and here’s how I went about it.

As some of you already know, I run a bunch of tumblr blogs on the side, one for erotic mad science/sci-fi images, one for somewhat-ickier-than-usual erotic mad science/fantasy images, and one for miscellaneous erotic imagery I just happen to like. (And if you must know, I also run three PG-rated tumblers, devoted respectively to libraries, cities, and examples of cool classic technology.) I sifted through my erotic tumblrs and pulled down twenty images that I enjoyed but which I wished I could know more about. Shipped to Bacchus, and within a few days had at least something on all of them.

Here are some examples of Bacchus’s work:

Begin with this image. I’ve always had a weakness for girls in glasses.

Bacchus’s report:

Attribution Report (by Bacchus)

Thanks for having me research this image! It appears to be a manga/hentai type image by an artist known as Rezi, being identified as such at many websites including the following several examples:

http://naked-anime.com/pic_details.php?pid=12472&size=0
http://www.zedge.net/wallpaper/6163455/
http://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/413897?pool_id=1168

The Danbooru site in particular is a large and well-tagged collection that I consider a fairly reliable source of image metadata.

Fun fact: one of those pages described the girl shown as “meganeko” which apparently refers to an archetypical girl having very large glasses and being considered cute as a consequence: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meganeko)

Unfortunately I was not able to find out any more specific information about this image or about the artist “Rezi”. However, there is a great deal of Rezi-identified art available on the web. Here are several large Rezi image sets:

http://g.e-hentai.org/g/178315/0595d731ae/
http://g.e-hentai.org/g/569575/38a540bca4/
http://g.e-hentai.org/g/406230/d1fbd31354/
http://nevsepic.com.ua/anime/3707-art-by-rezi-107-rabot.html
http://daydreaming5.tistory.com/4963

Given the enormous variety of websites where this image appears and that many of them are in foreign languages, I was unable to track down a specific website or page that marks the first or earliest appearance of this image on the web. There are suggestions that it was originally part of a group of images packaged for use as computer wallpaper, but I didn’t find the actual image package, just various reviews of it no longer associated with working links.

I hope this satisfies your curiosity about this image.

Thanks again — Bacchus

Cool! I now have access to much more than I did before. Let’s try another, an image that is very much Erotic Mad Science:

Bacchus’s report:

Attribution Report (by Bacchus)

Hi, thanks for having me research your image. This one is by the artist “Sabu” or “Sabudenego” which may be a pen name for Frank Bruner judging by one of his gmail addresses. You can find the image on his pages here:

http://www.thesabu.artworkfolio.com/gallery/384830#11
http://www.paperdemon.com/rc/art/view/26125#

The image is called “Unohana Experiment Stage 2″ and it’s identified as “2009 photoshop/wacon tablet.” It’s part 2 of a commission for “Bostik” starring the characters Retsu Unohana and Nemu Kurotsuchi from the manga franchise “Bleach” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleach_%28manga%29). Part 1 of the commission is here: http://www.hentai-foundry.com/pictures/user/sabudenego/54257/Retsu-Unohana-Commission

According to the artist bio page here ( http://www.thesabu.artworkfolio.com/about/ ) Sabu is “a Brazilian guy who loves art, games, comics & porn.” Sabu also has a Hentai Foundry profile with many images:

http://www.hentai-foundry.com/user/sabudenego/profile

And there is a page of his artwork here as well:

http://www.imagefap.com/pictures/3697557/Artist-Sabudenego

I hope this has satisfied your curiosity about this image! Thanks again –

Bacchus

Splendid — let’s try one more. Another image that just says “erotic mad science.”

And…

Attribution Report (by Bacchus)

Hey, thanks for having me research your image of interest. This one is called “Virtual Orgasm” and dates from 2007:

http://r-tan.deviantart.com/art/Virtual-Orgasm-177880566

The artist is Raymond Tan (R-Tan), whose Deviant Art profile is here:

http://r-tan.deviantart.com/

He’s got quite an assortment of very attractive art in his DA gallery:

http://r-tan.deviantart.com/gallery/

A little more info about R-Tan is here:

http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/user/rtan

I hope this satisfies your curiosity about this image! Thanks again –

Bacchus

Simple and to the point. And you must admit, that’s a lot more fun that Google image search.

So if you want to know about your images, whether you run a site and want to provide image provenance, or whether you’re just an enthusiast, you should ask yourself for any image “is it worth five dollars to know more?” If the answer is yes, then you know who to get in touch with!