The lovers can hardly leave each other: The young man, already on the train, bends once more out of the window and gives his girlfriend on the platform of Peterborough a last kiss. Both eyes look at each other in rapture.
So moved that they do not even notice Chris Porsz pressing the shutter button on his Kodak Instamatic just then. Click.
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The lovers earlier - and today: Move the slider in the picture
And already steals the amateur photographer, on that day sometime in the year 1980. He notes neither name nor phone number of the two. Why? Every passing minute, Porsz sets off to photograph people from his hometown in Cambridgeshire, eastern England, on hundreds of photos. Only in 1986 does the Englishman put an end to it, the job as a paramedic and the three small children leave him no more time for his hobby.
For decades, the photos turn yellow in an album. Until Porsz picks them up one day - and takes a bold plan: He wants to track down the unknown people portrayed by him and photograph them a second time. The same people. At the same place. 40 years later. "What a gigantic job, but the idea simply could not let go of me ... At some point, the whimsy became an addiction," says the 63-year-old in the one-day conversation and laughs.
His search lasted seven years. The result is shown in the now published photo book "Reunions": 135 times Porsz was able to track down the people he had photographed between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s and get them moving to a reunion.
From punk to gardener
"It was beautiful to bring together people who had long since disintegrated, to see the smiles on their faces as they embraced their old friends, many who had not seen each other for decades and traveled extra to take their photos from abroad," says Porsz ,
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Reunion after 37 years: school friends Sandra, Carmen and Maureen
In the tricky search first helped him - quite classic - the local newspaper. From 2009, the "Peterborough Evening Telegraph" printed the recordings: In the weekly column "Paramedic Paparazzo" Porsz presented two photos and asked for feedback. The first caller was the father of that twens from the station - he identified his son Tony Wilmot in the photo.
What happened to the crushed couple: Tony married his girlfriend Sally a year after the 1980 snapshot. They had two children and moved to Lichfield in Staffordhire. Today, both work as principals and are still happily married.
It was different Tina Tarr and Dog, 1985 both punks (see photo gallery) . When Porsz photographed them in Peterborough at the time, they were a couple. Pinned Tina with pink-punk mane to Dog nestled, torn leather air, beer bottle on the right. Together, they left the city in the 1990s. Went on trips, got twins. And parted.
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Sprint to Pommes-Bude: Five schoolboys in 1980 - and 36 years later
For Porsz they posed again in 2015: Tina is now gray, wearing a quilted vest, weaving workshops. Dog wears bald instead of iro, lives in Wales, works as a gardener. Porsz tracked the two via Facebook, where he has also uploaded his photos. The social networks, he says, greatly simplified his search. Sometimes he was helped by sheer coincidence. Like Trudi and Dave.
"Often the tears flowed"
In 1980, Porsz photographed them in the square in front of Peterborough Cathedral, where they drank a can of Vimto lemonade; a poodle looked over the young man's shoulder. The recording was published in Porsz designed photo calendar "Peterborough through the lens". In 2010, the paramedic of a group of nurses showed this calendar during a break in the hospital.
One shouted as he flipped off June, "That's me!" As it turned out, the photo was taken on Trudi Talbot's 21st birthday, exactly half a year after she and her partner Dave got married. For the reunion photo in 2010, the couple had to borrow the daughter's dog - the faithful-looking poodle is no longer there.
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Trudi and Dave: After 30 years still happily married
Another time, his job helped him with the search: A man recognized the paramedics in an emergency call. "He pointed to me and said, 'You photographed me 30 years ago!' It was like winning the lottery, "says Porsz.
Two out of seven friends already dead
His research was not always successful. Some were recognized by relatives or friends, but did not want to step back in front of the camera together. Sometimes Porsz could not reconstruct the exact location of the shot. And some of the people he had photographed decades ago had already passed away.
Of the seven punk friends who lingered on the steps in the early Eighties and looked so supercool into the camera, two - Kim Guest and Sean Adams - are no longer alive. "Often the tears flowed when we staged the reunion photo, old feelings came up, grief, nostalgia," says Porsz.
From time to time a relative also jumped in for a deceased person. For example, in the case of the three little girls who once glared at Porsz from a balcony: for one of them, who died of cancer in her mid-thirties, the daughter and sister of the dead stand on the reunion photo.
Since the amateur photographer released his "Reunions" tape, he has been celebrated on the Internet as a hero and received hundreds of requests. In China, Australia, Alaska, all over the world, people are interested in his project - the echo has overwhelmed him: "Why do people like my pictures so much, maybe because I'm telling a positive story in a negative time?"
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Chris Porsz, Jo Riley:
Reunions
Chris Porsz, via his homepage; from £ 18.50.
Whether after the Brexit in England or the Trump election in the US: In many places, hate, xenophobia, prejudice are currently winning. He wants to oppose his ideal of a multicultural, open society, says Porsz, son of a Jewish mother who has survived the concentration camp Ravensbrück: "I hate racism, because I know where he leads." His parents, who were from Poland, moved to Peterborough at the end of the Second World War in order to make a fresh start abroad.
They are just as much a part of Porsz as the clothing salesman Tasbir Singh, whom Porsz photographed at the Peterborough market in 1982. Or the shy Zaroob Hussain crouching behind a wooden gate, who works today in a snack bar. Or Michael Ross, the Scottish homeless nicknamed "Nobby," who spent years camping in a bus stop because his house burned down.
In September 2015, the amateur photographer "Nobby" caught and photographed him a second time: The man who is walking through the pedestrian area of Peterborough, has now gained a good deal. He wears a voluminous, white polo shirt over his beige trousers, has shaved off his long beard. And finally a tight roof over your head.