Our barn is home to a number of hoards. One is early nineties Specialized Crossroads bikes. Others, a lifetime of magazine addiction, a book inheritance and perhaps the most precious one to me, all my negatives – tens of thousands of them, stretching back to a photographic schooling thirty years ago. Largely disinteresting dross I imagine that bears no more preserve than a glance and smile, there will however likely be the chance to see differently the things I photographed and look past the aspects I thought important to those I overlooked at the time.
That’s a prime job for global shutdown like we currently have but alas I have no scanner. The interim plan is to engage a 55mm Macro lens kindly lent me but that’s an undertaking as yet embarked upon.
What I have started doing is to look back through hard drive storage but not so much for the picked and published prime cuts as much as the overlooked and cast aside. Seeing an episode from a new perspective is a relatively fresh take while I can’t take anything fresh.
Here is one such viewpoint. A tour of Flanders weekend that I saw first hand through the rangefinder of a Mamiya6 roll film camera. Pictures doing what they do so well, immediately transporting one back to recorded senses. The smell of beer everywhere. The taste of chips and mayonnaise lingering between top ups, the sound of cheap Euro dance music beamed through hurriedly erected PA systems and everywhere joy and escapism in a field that two days later would witness these decades old BMW E30s and Audi 80s turned from drunk cyclist tribe delivery rafts back to suited 9-5 traffic calmed normality.
So without more (pardon the pun) waffle, here in no particular order are some Belgian out takes that didn’t make the printed page from a while back – probably seven or eight years ago.