The 4 men with the carousel plane (generated with AI).
Anyone who carries a camera for long enough begins to collect an invisible archive.
These are the images that never made it onto a memory card: scenes glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, moments that would have made a perfect photograph—if only you had been a heartbeat quicker. The camera stays in the bag, reality moves on, and the image settles permanently behind your eyes.
Another one joined that archive in Antwerp.
You’re walking down the street, mind elsewhere, when the back doors of a van swing open. Without ceremony, four men step into the street carrying a small airplane—not a real one, but a carousel plane, the kind children once climbed into, now lifted carefully by adult hands. No explanation, no warning. Just a fragment of a fairground drifting briefly through everyday city life.
It was utterly surreal. Beautiful, even. A scene so unexpected that it stopped time for a second.
By the time I reached for my camera, the moment had already dissolved. The van closed, the men moved on, the street returned to normal. Another missed shot.
Later, unwilling to let the image fade, I turned to AI and tried to reconstruct what I had seen—not to replace the photograph I never took, but to give shape to a memory that refused to leave.
