‘I must admit I was very sceptical of phone photography at first,” Henk Stam says. Sixty years ago, he received his first camera for his 11th birthday. The advent of a newer technology initially stumped him. “My first portable phone, that we used to call ‘a brick’, had a terrible camera that took fuzzy pictures. But like everyone, I noticed the steady improvements,” he says.
This photo was taken in Portlantis, a visitors’ centre in the Port of Rotterdam that opened in spring 2025. Stam spent his working life in Canada but was born in the Netherlands and returned there on retirement. With a friend from his photo club, he went to visit Portlantis on a Monday, but found it closed. “As we were leaving, we noticed a large tour bus arriving filled with teenagers,” he says. “We simply joined the slipstream as they entered; no one batted an eyelid.”
