A photographer looked through people's forgotten, dead photo accounts for 5 years - here are the beautiful and eerie pictures he found
Doug Battenhausen
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:
- US buys 81 Soviet-era combat aircraft from Russia's ally costing on average less than $20,000 each, report says
- 2 states where home prices are falling because there are too many houses and not enough buyers
- A couple accidentally shipped their cat in an Amazon return package. It arrived safely 6 days later, hundreds of miles away.
- Why did a NASA spacecraft suddenly start talking gibberish after more than 45 years of operation? What fixed it?
- ICICI Bank shares climb nearly 5% after Q4 earnings; mcap soars by ₹36,555.4 crore
- Markets rebound sharply on buying in bank stocks firm global trends
- Bengaluru's rental income highest in Q1-2024, Mumbai next: Anarock report
- Rupee falls 10 paise to settle at 83.48 against US dollar