Doug Battenhausen thinks all our
advances in cell-phone cameras and photo-sharing technology haven’t made
our pictures better, but rather more sterile. We all know how to get
the perfect selfie now, with just the right filter — but to him, that’s
boring.
What Battenhausen is interested in, and has been collecting since 2010 on his blog “Internet History,” are photos that are beautifully amateurish and capture strange moments.
To find these types of photos,
Battenhausen mines the forgotten reaches of the internet, particularly
defunct photo accounts on sites like the (now deleted) Webshots, Flickr,
or Photobucket.
“If there's one rule I try to keep to all the time,” Battenhausen says. “It's
that I try to find pictures that have been abandoned. If you're still
actively using your photosharing website, I don't want to encroach on
that. Through 'Internet history,' I think I'm giving a second life to
orphans.”
But Battenhausen
doesn’t just take any old photo. He has a remarkable eye for finding
ones that can evoke some emotion. He describes them as sometimes funny,
sometimes bad, but usually photos that give him a feeling of “comforting
sadness.”
The photos on his site, which were
once featured in an exhibit at the Rhode Island School of Design, are
both bizarre and everyday at the time. Perhaps the best word to describe
them is wistful.
See the photos below, which have a meditative quality when you scroll through them:
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