Images found in Streets

In the spring of 1993, in a hollow tree on a street in Fez, Morocco, I found a crumpled piece of paper with two strips of negatives in it. Since that day I have found and collected negatives, slides and prints discarded or lost on streets, in buses and phone boxes or in the trash in places I have lived and visited. This project contains a selection of images produced from these originals.
The collection comprises single frames, passport pictures, prints and slides, and many strips of two or four negatives that slipped from their sleeve and fell to the ground. Some were rained on, most were walked on, and finally they ended up stuffed together in a fat envelope.

Little is known about these images beyond what is visible in them. Who took them, who had them, who lost them, and why? Who are the people in them and what is their relation to the photographer? Some have dates printed in the frame. Others are timeless.

After loosing a photographic original, the memory of it fades. As our memories are substantially supported by photography, this loss leaves a hole in our past. The image was not taken, the moment never took place, and the people in it never met. That fragment has been erased from its social context, virtually disowned and rejected by family and friends.
Now orphaned, it is accepted into a new context, a new family. The sets bear no relation to one another aside from their shared fate. Lost, rejected, discarded and literally trampled on.