We who were there to experience the first carnevals of Copenhagen speak about these events with much nostalgia. All of downtown Copenhagen was flooded by joyous danes dressed in strange costumes of a rather homemade and improvised nature. Any bystanders slow to seek shelter in stairways or shops were being swept away by massive waves of people swaying and bobbing down the pedestrian streets, dragging and pulling everybody with them in their ecstatic course.

The first carnevals were popular celebrations of life, and as so happens with great historic events they become specific references to whatever is happening in our lives at the time. As for myself I remember that I had my ear pierced as a tribute to Corto Maltese - the soldier of fortune, the dreamer, the adventurer from the graphic novels created by Hugo Pratt, and I met my first girlfriend at the carneval, her name being Julie as in "Romeo and Juliette", and for me neither was it ever really possible to find again the innocense and intensity of emotion from the first time.

Go to the reportage by stillphotographer Tor Kjems Knudsen