A photographer is collecting photos lost on the internet from a time before selfies and filters

Giving a second life to orphans from the point & click days

We now live in a world where almost everyone is a photographer. Everyone knows the angles that work and the ones that don’t, how to look their best in a selfie and how to apply a filter that will give the picture a luxurious or vintage feel.

Doug Battenhausen isn’t interested in this though, he hunts down photos from the days when you just pointed a camera at whatever was nearest and when sharing photos online was never possible, let alone the ultimate goal.

He’s collecting them in a blog called Internet History, an archive for photos forgotten about on now defunct sites like Photobucket, Webshots and Flickr.

“If there's one rule I try to keep to all the time,” Battenhausen told Business Insider, “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.”

He doesn’t merely dump all he finds though, but curates the ones that stir an emotion - often a “comforting sadness” - and these include photos of youthful backyard wrestling, slugs ‘smoking’ cigarettes, hauntingly dull plates of food and a ton of gloriously unfiltered inanimate objects.

Here’s a selection: