20 days left

There are 20 days left … and then the Furnace House will be blown up with explosives. Every effort is made to make this as safe as possible. All phosphorus has been removed from the Furnace House, as well as all other hazardous substances. The high part of the building will crash onto the pan square.
It is the literal end of the factory where I started working as an operator on December 1, 1980, after I stopped working as a marine engineer.

Thanks to Ayhan Tanfer I still have this souvenir. One of the many sight glasses of electrode cooling which the German Hoechst-engineers so nicely called “Tieffassung”.

This evening I’m burning a candle for all people who have worked extremely hard in this factory. All people who put their heart and soul into building and sustaining the labour-intensive production of elemental phosphorus. Especially for the people who lost their lives there during work …

I’ll start publishing 20 old photo’s I made during the last 40 years and wich are worth a thousend words … Every day at least one photo … but I’m aware of this quote:

“If there is one thing photography is here to teach us it would be that while one picture can be worth a thousand words, sometimes it takes a thousand pictures to get to that one.”