At Sea I Dream of Land, On Land I Dream of Sea

In this story, I reflect on my friendship with a remarkable man named Steen, who passed away in January 2024.

Steen was a nomad by choice, a man of wind and water devoted to a life without chains until fate gradually clipped his wings.

I portray him in his final bloom.

Steen lived unbound, driven by the roads and rivers that called to him. He was not only a wanderer in his travels but also in his work. In his twenties, he worked as a photographer during the late sixties and early seventies. Now, decades later, the thousands of negatives he left me awaken his stories once more.

When I met him in 2019, he had been living on his self-sufficient ship for more than forty years. The ship was more than a home; it was an extension of who he was. He could move whenever he wanted, following the rhythm of water and weather.

A year later, age, illness and lack of money forced him to sell the ship. Losing it meant losing far more than a place to live. It meant saying goodbye to the life that had defined him. Afraid of life ashore, Steen moved into his old campervan on a piece of land with no running water, electricity, or gas. Yet, true to his nature, he transformed the place into his own small paradise. With solar panels, generators, resourcefulness and determination, he created another self-sufficient world where he could continue living on his own terms.

But no matter how hard he tried, the water was gone.

The ship was gone.

And with them, a part of himself.

When he was eventually forced to leave that place, he moved once more, this time to a remote piece of land behind an abandoned farm in the Dutch countryside. The cancers he had survived and the many surgeries he had endured had not defeated him, but they had taken their toll. Steen no longer had the strength to build another paradise, to dream new dreams, or to begin again.

Only now do I realize how often Steen spoke of freedom in the past tense.

I look at photographs of him as a young man in his twenties, full of dreams and possibilities. Then I look at the portraits I made during the final years of his life. The same man, yet with a different gaze. His sense of freedom seems to have disappeared.

On January 13, 2024, Steen died in his camper, as he wished.

Like a bird that had lost its wings, but never its desire to fly.