The Skullset was intended as a diary, and Siegel went to great lengths to make it more than a standard party snapshot site. Rather than shooting digital, he opted for film. On the new site, Siegel's photos have a meditative stillness. While there's been talk of compiling the older photos into a book, he says that the permanence of that prospect is a little daunting. When Siegel pulled his first site offline for six months, the only evidence of the 20,000 pictures from the previous four years were images scattered among other websites and blogs. "That was interesting to me because something that feels permanent on the Internet could be gone faster than anything physical," says Siegel. LEFT:PHOTO BY ALEX OLSON

That self-deprecating attitude has carried over into No Retrospective. Although Siegel set up the site and is clearly the guy in charge, he chose not to list himself first among the contributors. Instead, he decided, "I wanted to have this space where my friends could show work. I thought it would be a lot cooler to have this gallery of everything they were doing." He's even iffy about editing their work. "My only rule is to post," he says. "It's their website now as much as mine. They have the password they can delete the whole thing." His one preference is that the site show original material, because, as he notes with some frustration, "We live in the age of the re-blog. There's a couple of folks who've decided to post jpegs and stuff they found on the Internet–but if it's something that has meaning to them, sure, I'm okay with that."

PHOTO BY MARLON RABENREITHER