‘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.”
There was still construction work being done inside, and as Stam nipped to the toilet, he spotted this worker’s legs sticking out of a cubicle, toolbox at his side. “It struck me as a minimalist tableau. Here, the royal family are referred to as the House of Orange, national teams and fans wear orange, and we festoon our streets with orange flags during major events. But I found it odd one would colour the toilets orange.”
Stam had left his camera with his friend, so grabbed this shot on his phone instead. He returned to Portlantis a few months later. “This time entering legitimately,” he says. “But nothing I captured then matched the uniqueness of this moment.”
