How it started

The commission led me to Newark airport in the summer of 2007.  I was chosen to work on a production for a rock band that boasted legions of fans during the golden era of pop music.

Emerging from the arrivals hall, I see my name, held by a dude that looked like Joe Pesci, hand-drawn black marker on a white sheet. Pleasantries and suitcases exchanged, I walk outside to a white limousine, door ajar, and we’re off.  Two wise men, me and Mr Joe, on a journey to Bethlehem, NJ, where the holiest of recording studio stands before us. God Bless the US of A.

Over the next week we’re holed up in the studio, splicing and dicing footage, until a small trip to a downtown NJ film archive shines true light on what will become an eternal passion; America.  America, the open road. America, the dream, past, present and future.  So there, in that small Archive, here on this small website from this small country, I travel through time, a carousel full of Kodachrome nostalgia, all of it dust in the wind...

Kodachrome

There was a time—not so long ago—when every milestone was captured on Kodachrome. Birthdays, backyard barbecues, road trips west. Americans, in love with their lives, eager to document the dream in color. The film was rich, saturated, almost too perfect—like memory through rose-tinted glasses. Through the boom of the Mid-Century Modern era, slide projectors hummed in basements and living rooms, casting snapshots of smiling families on living room walls. So popular it was, Kodak had to keep the factory lines rolling well into the psychedelic swirl of the ‘60s. But time, as it does, moved on. And Kodak—once a titan—grew slow, heavy. A dinosaur inching toward extinction.

Today, most of those slides sit in cardboard boxes, long forgotten. Some were tossed, water-damaged, auctioned off in estate sales. Their photographers? Often unknown. Sometimes gone. No one left to remember the names, the places, the why. And yet—some of these images still breathe. They carry a strange ache, a haunting familiarity. They don’t just show us the past. They make us feel it. That sharp tug in the chest. That flicker of a place you’ve never been but somehow miss. That’s Kodachrome.

Forgotten Slides

It started with a single slide—an image lost in time, rediscovered in a dusty box inside a New Jersey archive. A streetscape, a stranger's gaze, a moment framed in Kodachrome. That one image turned into hundreds. Then thousands. I became obsessed. Sifting through flea markets, estate sales, and long-forgotten storage bins. I tracked down negatives orphaned by time—snippets of mid-century America left behind like loose change in the couch of history.

The streets of Chicago, neon-lit diners in Georgia, laundromats in Ohio—frozen fragments of daily life, vivid and strange and familiar all at once. There's a beauty in the mundane, and a certain cinematic quality that makes you pause: Who were these people? What just happened? What’s about to?

Back in Amsterdam, I scan, restore, and breathe life back into them. Each slide is a second chance. A memory that never got told. They deserve to be seen. Because together, they tell a story—not just of America, but of us. The dreams, the detours, the dust in the wind.

Hi, I’m Wouter — the one digging through dusty boxes so you don’t have to.

I’m the creator of Forgotten Slides, originally rooted in Amsterdam, where my family and I once lived just a giraffe’s glance from the Artis Zoo. Most mornings began with a wave to our long-necked neighbors; most evenings ended with a few more slides scanned into the light. These days, we’ve traded city life for quieter moments in the Dutch countryside, just north of Amsterdam — where the stars shine a little brighter and the giraffes have been replaced by sea air and stillness. In my day-to-day, I love working with pioneers of all stripes — the bold creatives, the quiet geniuses, the tech minds who see the world in code and circuitry. It’s in that mix, where art meets logic, where real magic starts to happen.

Forgotten Slides is my way of blending that magic with memory — honoring the stories almost lost, and giving them one more moment in the sun.