My name is Brian Battjer. I've been posting photos of my life on to the web since 1996. Despite this website being online for twenty years, I never really knew what to write on the "About" page of this site because I always felt like this was a really weird hobby to have. But fast forward twenty years and since the advent of camera phones & Instagram, pretty much everyone in the world also now has this hobby! Which on one hand is wonderful because I feel like less of a weirdo, but on the other hand is terrible because I feel like a cyber-dinosaur!

Back in April of 2011 when Aki heard that I'd be in Whistler for the next PechaKucha night, she asked me if I'd put together a "pecha kucha" presentation about I Keep A Diary. PechaKucha, which means "chit-chat" in Japanese, is a presentation-format where the speaker talks to the audience about a topic using 20 slides that are automatically shown for 20 seconds each, for a total presentation length of six minutes and 40 seconds!

It sounded simple enough when I agreed to it (doesn't it always?), but trying to figure out exactly how I to plan out everything I wanted to say and making the slides interesting proved to be pretty tricky! Especially trying to figure out how to time 20 seconds of talking per slide. I've gone ahead and taken my basic presentation notes and turned them into captere's what I came up with!

I first picked up a camera in 1992. My sophmore year photography class in Roxbury High School, New Jersey. It was September of 1992 and I had just turned 16 in August. I was immediately captivated by the camera's seemingly-magical ability to freeze an instant of time. I loved everything about the darkroom and the development process. Watching an image that I had seen in the camera viewfinder slowly appear in the pool of delightfully-skunky developer made me feel like a MAGICAL ALCHEMIST every single time.

Around that same time, my friends and I would make frequent trips to various Salvation Army locations around northern New Jersey. Occasionally I'd buy a shirt or a knicknack, but I was mostly interested in going through the boxes of photographs that had been donated in estate sales. It seemed so tragic to me that so many meticulously-curated albums of people's cherished and wonderful memories could just end up in some thrift-store bargin bin. I marveled at the fact that as I looked through these photos of people I didn't know and had never met, they made me feel the same way as when I looked at my own photos. I always felt haunted by this nostalgia for things I've never know. I felt compelled to look at the photos. Felt an awe and weird kinship at witnessing so many intimate moments of peoples lives as they unfold through the years. Felt like somehow my witnessing paid them some sort of deserving homage.(My favorite album I found is called the K

In September 1995, I signed up for photography classes in college. Having a natural nocturnal disposition, when I gained access to a 24-hour darkroom, I found myself spending what seemed like half of my time in the photo lab. I was obsessed. In January 2005, I returned to campus after winter break to discover that someone had broken into my photo locker and taken a big equipment bag that contained ALL of my negative binders. I was devestated. In one felt swoop, I'd pretty much lost every photo and print I'd taken over the last three years. A fate worse than the Salvation Army bin. Just gone. I stopped taking photos and when anyone asked I told them "I'm done with that I guess." Here are a few surviving examples of my artwork from back then. Clearly this thief deprived the world.

In March 1966, my friend Scott and I went down to Miami for Spring Break. It had been three months since all gear had been stolen and I hadn't taken a single photo in all that time. But once we got down to Florida, I broke down and bought a disposable camera. (That way I was able to capture things like us the raccoon who we befriended with Cool Ranch Doritos and me getting my CLAVICLES PIERCED (!!!). I ended up falling in love with disposable cameras and snapshots. After spending so many hours in the darkroom, it felt like (guilty) liberation to just drop the whole camera off for someone else to deal with. I loved getting the prints back and started collecting them into albums.

In early November 1996, I was in the Newhouse computer lab looking at photos I'd just gotten back from a recent Halloween party. My classmate Dennis came over and was like "Let me show you the photos I took on Halloween, I put them online." I was completely blown away. He and Josh Newman worked in the computer lab and they both explained that everyone at the university had an account on the university's web server. (Dennis is known for Foursquare, but he also basically invented photo-blogging back in 1994.

I spent the next night in the computer lab using the scanner to scan my photos, shrink the HUGE files down to GIFs under 100K in size (back then, a each image would take ~45 seconds to load!). Using Mircosoft Notepad as a tex-editor, I learned to create basic HTML files and then learned the necessary UNIX commands to upload and publish the files to the university web-server. By early Novemeber, I'd managed to publish my very first photos online - four photos from a Halloween party at my friend Vin's house! I'll never forget how exciting it was to see them appear on my monitor for the first time. Just knowing that they were up there in CYBERSPACE and that anyone could look at them seemed so thrilling and shocking. I remember that almost no one else could look them because most people didn't use web-browsers. And even if they did, they probably didn't know how to locate the "tilde" key that was necessary to include in the cryptic, not-very-user-friend URL that had been auto-assigned based on my first, last and middle name.

Through the end of 1996, I published a whopping 8 photos online. My parents gave me a scanner that year for Christmas and I spent a lot of my insomnia hours up late scanning my photographs, uploading them and posting them online with narrative captions. When we had house parties, we used to put URLs on the fliers we made that contained photos from the last party we'd thrown! It was so exciting to hand out fliers to people and then refresh the server log to see if anyone had gone online to view them!

In December 98, I was living in Fairfield, CT and working at my first job out of college as an junior account exec at Modem Media when I received an email from Syracuse telling me that since I no longer went there, they were going to be erasing my web-hosting account. I was living with Josh and he told me that he and Dennis were going to be moving their websites to a domain that they'd bought and I was welcome to join them if I chipped-in for hosting. And so the three of us moved all of our files to Dodgeball.com. (Above you can see the original index page we put up!). In December 1999, I moved to New York to join my former Modem Media colleage at a music startup called Hangspace. In June of 2000, I moved to Greenpoint with a few friends from college and spent a few months converting an empty loft into a two-story, four-bedroom tiki-themed village. I posted photos online document the construction and the slow transformation of the space and it led to us being featured in the Village Voice's Shelter column.

In October 2001, Dennis asked Josh and I if we could move our sites elsewhere so he could use the Dodgeball.com domain to host the collaborative city-guide he'd developed as an ITP grad school project. Josh moved his files to MediaTavern.com, and I bought the domain ikeepadiary.com, as a nod to one of my favorite songs off of Braid's (incredible) Frame & Canvas album.

The day after I re-launched the site, I decided to break the piggy bank and buy my very first digital camera, a Canon PowerShot S300. Freed from the expense of film and development, I was able to snap away to my heart's content for the very first time. On top of that, I no longer had to manually scan each photo. The number of photos I was able to publish online quintupled!