— In 2006, I started working in Haarlem (an old city near Amsterdam) for The Spaarnestad Archive. It is a big archive of nearly 14 million old analogue photos from all over the world. I was asked to work for the digital database of the archive, so I photographed thousands and thousands of small, sometimes very old, analogue photographs with special equipment, gave them numbers, worked on them with Photoshop to make them as clear as possible, and sometimes digitally restored them when they were damaged.

After a few weeks at my new job it was absolutely clear to me that I was sitting on top of a goldmine. I couldn’t believe my eyes every time I opened one of the hundreds of grey filing cabinets. I discovered so many photographs with great image quality that were hidden in the dark for years and years, invisible to the outside world. I asked the director, Peter van den Doel, if it was alright if I would spend more time in the archive room just looking for old photographs that were too special to ignore. He gave me at once all the freedom that I needed for my own personal search. How lucky was it for someone who loves images the way I do. As long as I remember, I was looking with great pleasure and curiosity through every book and magazine I could lay my hands on.

So, from that moment, I did my normal daily work for the archive, but besides that I started to collect on the same computer my, sometimes strange, treasures. And I started to write about it: on Facebook, on PhotoQ, a photographic website in Holland, and for magazines. And I still do, I write two times a week about an old photograph on Facebook, plus a column for the professional magazine SHUTTER.photo.