Transcript of Interview with Douglas Battenhausen founder of Internet History. (took place over e-mail from June 25, 2014-June 27th 2014)

Lily Bartle: First of all, what made you start this blog? How did you become interested in “internet history?”

Douglas Battenhausen: I started the blog as a way to share the pictures I was finding while lurking the internet during down time at my job or free time at home. I can’t remember how I got into searching through people’s blogs and the pictures they’d post to photo sharing sites, but I know I was inspired to start posting them online by a blog called Sorry I Missed Your Party. The woman who ran it has gone on to bigger things, but that was one of the first sites I can think of where someone was collecting the kinds of pictures I liked to see. SIMYP and I used to send each other the weirdest stuff we could find online and I started internethistory as a way to log and collect the images I found interesting while I was doing all this searching.

LB: What is your process for finding these images? Do most of them come from submissions or do you spend a lot of time looking through online archives like Photobucket, etc…?

DB: I’ll go to a photo site, say flickr or photobucket, and I’ll come up with a search term like “cheeseburger.” I rarely post pictures of what I’m actually searching for, it’s more about being interested in the other photos people who take pictures of, say, cheesburgers, will post. If that makes sense. It gives me a broad enough group of images to search and limits me as well.

Almost every photo I post, I’ve found by myself. I spend a significant amount of time searching for photos, but I’ve cut back in recent months. I’ll occasionally post submissions from people who seem to “get me,” but usually, the stuff people send me doesn’t resonate.

LB: What factors do you consider when you’re finding content for the blog? Do you prioritize specific types of subject matter or do you try to remain objective?

DB: I have a vague set of rules I try to follow when I post images to my blog:  I try to find images from accounts that are no longer active, shot by amateurs, taken preferably before 2008 on digital point and shoots. As far as content goes, there are definitely kinds of pictures I enjoy, but I’d like to think I’m objective. Usually, I’m just happy to find something I can post.

LB: When a photo goes from somewhere else on the internet to your blog, what happens to it? How does your blog affect these images?

DB: I think that question might be better answered by someone who looks at my blog rather than me. On my end, I’m pulling some stranger’s photo from a bunch of other photos she took that I probably find boring, presenting it to thousands of people I know less about than the person whose photo I found, and asking all of them to take a look. Posting an image to my blog de- and recontextualizes that image, makes it a different kind of object than it was before, but aside from that, I’m not sure. I do think I’m giving these images a kind of second life, but maybe I’m too close to the images to give you a better answer.

LB: Do you see yourself as an archivist? Historian? Curator? Artist? None of these? All of them?

DB: You could argue internethistory is an archive – and at this point, probably an extensive one- and it is heavily curated, and it does document some kind of history (oddly, I don’t think it’s technically “internet history”), and I think there is an art to what I do, but I wouldn’t call myself any of those things. Then again, maybe I am…? I feel like those terms are better applied by others to me than to apply them to myself.

That said, here’s a secret:  I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing. All I can say for sure is that I post the kinds of pictures that I like to look at. Someone told me that having no idea what you’re doing but continuing to do it anyway makes you an artist, or something like an artist, but I’m not sure I buy that.

LB: Can you talk a little about what it means to you to appropriate an image? Is there a thought process behind your choice to conceal or reveal the sources of the images? I guess this is just a slightly more specific version of  question 5.

DB: A few years ago, my favorite site to find pictures, webshots, basically went defunct. Something like hundreds of millions of pictures got deleted and as far as I know are gone forever, unless the users transferred the photos to some other photo sharing service or they’re still on a hard drive somewhere. That’s a lot of content that’s been lost to history. I have a suspicion that at least 90% of the photos I posted from webshots only exist at this point because I bothered to screenshot and post them.

I bring this up because I have a strange relationship with the pictures I find and post:  I know they aren’t mine, but I can’t help but feel a little responsible for them and in the case of the photos I (literally) saved, like, maybe they are mine? Or maybe they belong to someone or something else now.

When I reveal the sources of the images I post, it’s usually my way to provide more context for the picture or my suggestion to check out more photos from the same user. I don’t usually cite my sources because I like the mystery of it; I think it adds something to the image. Also, my apologies to the photographers, but there probably isn’t much else of interest to see.

The funny thing is, I don’t keep track of where I found the pictures, so after a while, the source is a mystery to me, too. Ultimately, we’re probably better off not knowing.

LB: What does “internet history” mean to you? Could you define it? Or does your understanding of it change? If it does change could you talk a little bit about how/why.

DB: When I started posting found photos under “internet history,” I seem to remember having broader goals for the project than what it ended up becoming. I imagined documenting more of the internet than just pictures, but the pictures stuck and here we are.

I think there is something special about the pictures I try to post, those weird mid-2000s images when digital cameras proliferated to a bunch of people who only had a vague idea of what they were doing with them, on a time before smart phones, before Facebook became the mess it is today, when it seemed like almost all the photos you posted online were public. In that regard, I am documenting a certain era of internet history. At least I think so. I invite anyone to read into the name.

I think, however, the irony is that what I wanted to be something extensive and encompassing became oddly personal. If internethistory documents anyone’s literal internet history, it’s my own.