Archive recovery, design & build.
What was wrong
Barat Ali Batoor is a Hazara photographer and filmmaker in Melbourne, and the first winner of the Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year, for a frame he made on the first day of his own crossing by boat. When his old site came down in 2025, nine bodies of work went with it, the links people had shared for six years went dead, and his film, his talks and his exhibitions had nowhere to live. He speaks to two audiences at once: the festivals, universities and press who book him, and the Hazara community he comes from, who read Hazaragi.
What I built
I went after the photographs first. His old site’s images survived in the Wayback Machine, so I recovered every one I could find, compared them pixel by pixel to catch the same frame uploaded twice, and added the ten from his 2015 TED essay: 236 photographs, each with its source on record. The site opens on all of them at once, on one wall, and the scroll dives into a single print until it is the screen. On screen his photographs are moved, never treated. Every page exists in English and Hazaragi, and his film, his talks, his exhibitions and forty-three interviews each have a place of their own.
Where it landed
Live at batoor.com: 570 pages in two languages, the old addresses leading somewhere again, and nine bodies of work back on the web under his own name.
- photographs recovered
- 236
- pages, in two languages
- 570
- old links working again
- 45
Built with Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind v4, GSAP, Lenis, Vercel.
