Almost forgot … I was going to post some scans from the past every now and then.

1996, Luxembourg – Echternach

This is my cousin Jef and he used to be my partner in crime in many of my teenage adventures. Our friendship really took off on family parties when we were kids. While the adults and the little kids were eating pancakes indoors we went for a walk in the streets around my grandparents’ house to discover that if you kicked the poles of the street lights hard enough, they went out for a couple of minutes. The challenge was to get the whole street into darkness before the first lamp went back on.

During school holidays I always stayed over at his place for a couple of days and he with me. We spent most of our time playing games on the Commodore C64 (remember Kung Fu Master, Hero and Frogger), watching ninja movies and making shurikens out of Mercedes badges. We learned to play campfire guitar together. There must be some tapes of our famous concerts, but I won’t torture you with it. We even started doing some photography at the same time.

For a couple of years our families went camping together for a couple of days each August. Jef and I explored the forests around Dinant on our own and after a few years we got permission to go out on a two day trip. That was only the start of many outdoor trips. We both discovered mountain biking and combined our love for camping in the wild (illegal in Belgium) with the adrenalin rush of the bike during countless trips to the south of Belgium.

This picture must have been taken during one of the last trips we did together, maybe even the last. After that we still went biking pretty often but only for one day. Now we both have our own busy lives. When we see each other on a family reunion, we don’t go kicking streetlights anymore but we always plan to go biking again … one day.

A picture doesn’t have to be technically perfect to make you remember a story that you had otherwise forgotten about. As a photographer I find it hard to put a photo online or on my wall that doesn’t meet my technical criteria. Finding a box with old pictures and negatives made me think a bit differently. Taking a quick look at those pictures instantly brought back a lot of nice memories. How many of those stories would have been lost forever if I had thrown away all the pictures that didn’t meet my photographic criteria?

I’m a nostalgic guy. Not in the way that I want to go back to “the good old days” but in the sense that I cherish my memories. So I decided to dig up some pictures from my past, scan them and put them online. These are the stories that made me who I am and I don’t want time and my chaotic brain to lock them up in the dungeons of my memory forever.

1994, Crete – somewhere on the West coast

In the summer of 1994, I was 19 and the world was at my feet. I graduated from high school and although I had a great time in the last three years of high school, I also looked forward to broaden my horizon and discover the world of adults. The year before, I found out I wasn’t good enough for professional basketball and saw this as a chance to try life on the wild side. The previous summer I spent three weeks in Spain on a youth camp and in 1994 I was asked to be a monitor on their camps in Crete. I jumped to the opportunity because that would allow me to spend two months in Crete (2 camps with 2 weeks in between).

Imagine 70-100 boys and girls between 16 and 26 staying in tents on the beach on this beautiful island. There were no rules, the participants just had to find their own way to build a mini society for 3 weeks. We offered lots of activities like windsurfing, scuba diving, painting, photography, parties, … My job was to organize some trips around the island. Don’t think of me being a tour guide on an airconditioned bus talking in a microphone about the cultural treasures of Crete. Usually I just rented a small Fiat Panda for a couple of days, drove back to the camp and yelled: “who wants to come?” Fifteen minutes later a fully packed Fiat would arrive at the main road and we would vote left or right.

That was exactly the way it went when the picture above was made. The six people in the Fiat Panda voted left because someone heard about a beautiful beach somewhere on the Northeast coast. We got terribly lost in the hills at night and pulled over to ask someone “where is the sea?” The guy took a while to think and then put a big smile on his face and said: “I sea you, you sea me”. Eventually we found the beach and just slept there. In the morning it turned out to be a beautiful beach indeed but beaches are boring so we rented a pedal boat. It proved to be less dependable than a Fiat Panda and sunk with the six of us on board. After a long swim back to the beach, the owner waited for us and didn’t seem very happy. I know we didn’t pay him but I can’t remember how we talked or ran our way out of that situation.

It’s hard to believe but the athletic Greek god you see in the picture above is now a professional photographer that blogs about old pictures. I’m pretty sure this photo was taken by the now famous Belgian advertising photographer Kurt Stallaert. The negatives are in a very bad shape but it’s a miracle that there’s still something visible if you know that they were developed in the camp’s darkroom: a tent that was made light tight by hanging big sheets of black plastic over it. In there it was around 50 degrees Celcius so we basically mixed our chemicals with sweat instead of water.