This morning started the way a lot of mornings start now: coffee in hand, thumb scrolling through Instagram Reels. Once upon a time people sat at the breakfast table with a newspaper and caught up on the world while the toast cooled. Now we sit there half-awake, letting the algorithm decide what we’re going to look at before the caffeine fully kicks in.
Somewhere in that endless stream of videos, a creator started talking about the Internet Archive. I’ll admit something that might sound a little strange for someone who spends plenty of time online, I had never actually explored it before. I knew it existed, of course, but I’d never gone wandering through it myself.
In the video, the creator mentioned that the Archive contains scans of old print advertisements from magazines. That alone was enough to grab my attention. I’ve always had a soft spot for vintage design and photography. Something about the look and feel of older ads just hits a certain aesthetic nerve for me.
So naturally I opened up a browser and decided to see what all the fuss was about.
It didn’t take long before I landed on a page filled with old magazine ads. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. It felt a little like rummaging through a dusty attic full of old magazines someone forgot to throw away, except everything was neatly scanned and waiting for you to stumble across it.
Two ads jumped out almost immediately. Both came from an April 1986 issue of Playboy.
Now this might surprise some people, but growing up Mormon meant I didn’t exactly have access to many Playboy magazines. So even now, as an adult, my experience with the magazine is pretty limited. Like most people, I grew up hearing the classic joke about people claiming they read Playboy “for the articles,” and I always assumed that was just a clever excuse.
What I didn’t realize until today is that back in the 80s and 90s a huge chunk of the magazine was actually articles and advertisements. From what I could see, something like eighty percent of the pages were writing or ads, leaving only a smaller portion for what most people immediately associate with the magazine.
And some of those articles were surprisingly serious.
While browsing, I stumbled across a long piece about the War on Drugs and the propaganda surrounding it. Not a throwaway article either, the writer had clearly done his homework. It was thoughtful, detailed, and the kind of thing that probably gave readers plenty to chew on.
It definitely wasn’t what I expected when I clicked into a random Playboy issue from the 80s.
But honestly, the real highlight for me was the advertising.
Inside that same issue were two camera ads, one for Canon and one for Olympus, and they immediately caught my eye. They were
beautifully done. Strong composition, interesting lighting, and just enough storytelling in the image to make you imagine the kind of life you might live with that camera in your hands.
They just don’t make ads like that anymore.
What struck me most is that these cameras are now decades old, yet those advertisements still have the power to make me want one. That’s impressive. Most modern ads barely stick in your memory long enough to survive the next scroll.
These older ads feel different. They’re stylish, thoughtful, and very clearly made by people who understood photography and human psychology. They weren’t just selling a product, they were selling a feeling.
And as someone who loves photography, that kind of thing is endlessly interesting. There’s a lot to study there. The lighting. The styling. The mood. All of it could easily inspire ideas for my own work.
So I’m genuinely grateful to that random creator on Instagram who mentioned the Internet Archive this morning. What started as casual scrolling over coffee turned into discovering an entire world of old magazines, articles, and beautifully crafted advertisements.
Something tells me I’ll be spending a lot more time wandering through the Archive in the months ahead. And honestly, there are worse ways to lose an afternoon than flipping through the visual history of the past.
