about time tales:

time tales is a project by photographer astrid van loo and webdesigner dick dijkman.

you stand at a flea market holding an old photo album. one of the photos shows a newly married couple dressed in Sunday best; a few pages further, a frayed snapshot of a swimsuit-clad little girl, posing against a wall. the photos seem to have been taken somewhere around the 1930s. who are these people? are they still alive? how did this album end up at a flea market? is there no next of kin? maybe the family just didn’t care all that much about some great-uncle or other living in Finland. the photos are deemed worthless, and discarded.

not all photos in time tales faced their waterloo this way. some are scooped up from streets and alleyways, fallen from an overstuffed bag or torn pocket. others turn up in a cabinet’s hidden compartment, found while wandering the rooms of an abandoned house. now the photos exist by themselves, lost in time. time tales does not want to reveal their mysteries, nor can we. time tales asks to be the new home for lost photos, a resting place, for the nameless and the lost.

this website
the collection is divided in 5 periods: pre-1930; 1930-1950; 1950-1970; 1970-1990; and 1990-present. as the origin of some images is hard to trace, a bit of amateur detective work is often in order; "we had a floor lamp like that, it must be the sixties!"
we choose to show the photos as they where found. no stories or suggestions, just the finder, place and year. if there is anything written on the back of the photo, we note that as well.

- time tales offers you the opportunity to submit your own found photographs to the website

dick dijkman
delfzijl, the netherlands, 1966
studied:
1983-1989 | academy of arts, arnhem, the netherlands
graduated as a painter in 1989.

dick dijkman lives and works in nijmegen, the netherlands.
www.dykmanwebdesign.nl