Blog Girls
The mid-2000s internet had this incredible ecosystem of people just putting their lives and work into these little web spaces. Not for metrics, not for some algorithm that didn’t exist yet—just because they had something to say. I spent a lot of time hunting through blogs back then, following links, finding people whose aesthetic or thinking actually mattered to me.
There was Janina in Darmstadt, posting these careful photographs. Fashion imagery, bodies covered in tattoos, Angelina Jolie with tape over her breasts—the mix of found material and personal documentation. What got me was the precision of it, how deliberately each image sat next to the others. You could feel her looking, her considering what went where. That’s what separated it from just posting pretty pictures.
Mercedes was writing from Munich, arguing strenuously that life existed outside Berlin’s gravitational pull. This was when Berlin was swallowing all the cultural oxygen for German internet. She was documenting the alternative scene in Munich—bands, exhibitions, parties—with this particular pride. Here’s what’s happening here. We’re not invisible just because we’re not in the capital. That perspective stayed with me.
Cory Kennedy was already a ghost by the time I really noticed her. The prototypical internet celebrity—photographed at parties, dissected constantly, the embodiment of a particular moment in American nightlife. International currency by age twenty. And then she just vanished. Not in any dramatic way, just stopped appearing. The internet moved on. Every few years someone would ask what happened to her and nobody quite knew. That absence became its own kind of legend.
Sara was operating in a completely different register. Explicit, aggressive, not interested in being palatable. Writing about sex and class and the particular hell of being young with no safety net. And actually doing the things, not just writing about them afterward. Taking off on these travels, reporting back. There was something genuinely fearless about the work.
Mia Bühler seemed to be everywhere at once—writing for three different blogs simultaneously, posting about music and design and her own life across different platforms, maintaining this almost inhuman level of output. How did she have the time? But there she was, pushing everything forward, touching everything with the same visual intelligence.
What I remember most is that none of it felt like content. It felt like actual people with actual taste making actual work in a space where they had complete control. No monetization, no real audience metrics, no algorithm deciding what you’d see. That constraint was the freedom. You made the thing because the thing was worth making, and maybe three hundred people would find it. That was enough.