These photographs resurfaced not from a shoebox or a forgotten sleeve of negatives, but from the Wayback Machine. Archived fragments of an old blog, preserved imperfectly, stripped of context, captions half missing, formatting broken. Digital fossils. Things I once put into the world without much thought that they would one day come back to me like this.

I know some on film, some on early digital. I don’t need the negatives to tell me that, they are in a shoebox, probably. It’s there in the way the light behaves, in the colour drift, in the slight reluctance of the image to explain itself. But what struck me wasn’t the medium. It was the distance.

Looking at them now, I’m not revisiting memories so much as encountering evidence. Proof that I was somewhere, looking at something, long enough to decide it was worth stopping for. The blog text that once sat alongside them has either vanished or aged badly. The photographs have held up better.

They were never meant to last like this. Early blogs were ephemeral by design. You wrote them quickly, published them casually, assumed they would be read briefly and then sink. The idea that they would be scraped, archived, flattened into a historical record by a machine years later wasn’t part of the deal. And yet here they are, divorced from intent, floating free of explanation.

What’s interesting is how little they need it.

The places feel transitional. Cafés closed or closing. Streets paused between uses. Buildings that once signalled something now quietly neutral. Chairs stacked, umbrellas folded, trees stripped back to structure. People are mostly absent. Not because they weren’t there, but because I was already more interested in what remained when they left.

I don’t remember taking some of these photographs. That’s not forgetfulness so much as honesty. They were taken while moving, between places, between conversations, between versions of myself. They weren’t made for a project. They weren’t composed to say anything clever. They were simply moments where something in front of me held just enough tension to deserve a frame.

What the Wayback Machine preserves is not nostalgia, but residue. It doesn’t care which images mattered more, which posts were better written, which moments felt important at the time. It captures everything with the same indifference. In doing so, it reveals patterns you didn’t know you were forming.

Looking back, the consistency is unsettling. Memory edits constantly. It smooths, it justifies, it rewrites. These images don’t. They sit there, grainy and slightly unresolved, refusing to be improved. In that sense, they are more honest than recollection.

This isn’t about longing for how things were. It’s about recognising continuity. About seeing that the way I look at the world now was already present then, even if I didn’t yet have the language for it.

The blog is gone. The formatting is broken. The comments are lost. What remains are the images.

Simon Johnson and Angelo

Toronado Dave