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Caption: 'THE FREEZER MAN' Searching for
Caption: Some time ago, my friend Lex asked me to go on a trip to Oslo, Norway, to make some photographs to run with a story he was writing. It was the start of a pretty weird weekend with the bearded guy known as 'The Freezer Man'.
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Caption: Lex is a journalist for a Dutch newspaper and just came back from a small town in Colorado. He visited a wooden shack that houses a corpse, that has been frozen solid for over twenty years.
The 'frozen dead guy', as the American locals call him, is the grandfather of Trygve, a bearded Norwegian guy that Lex tried to find for his story. He couldn't reach him, though, so we traveled to Oslo to go and look for him.
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Caption: LEX
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Caption: After a while doing research in and around Oslo, we found out that Trygve was going to swim in the salt water of a fjord, a Norwegian sea inlet.
He was going to take his traditional swim on the shortest day of the year and believes that a dive in the icy water keeps him healthy.
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Caption: We met Trygve when he was checking the temperature of the water, which was exactly 0,5 degrees Celsius.
He froze his dead grandfather because he believes that scientists are once able to resuscitate his grandpa.
It sounded a bit weird, but a lot of other people believe in 'cryonics' as well. I see it as a mixture between religion and science.
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Caption: TRYGVE
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Caption: After Lex took an icy swim as well, Trygve told us about his grandfather in his Oslo house, hung with tin foil because he gets headaches from cellphone radiation. He made dinner for us: he only eats sprouts and raw vegetables (it was uhm.. Special).
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Caption: Lex and I decided I had some good shots of Trygve swimming in the ice cold inlet, but there was no icing on the salt water. So the next day, we took Trygve to the mountains above Oslo to swim in a frozen lake. He called a friend with a chainsaw to cut a hole in the 30 cm thick ice, and.. They took a swim! Crazy.
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Caption: If you can read Dutch, the whole 'Diepvriesman' story that Lex wrote is available on a Dutch app called 'Fosfor'. You'll find out more about (amateur) cryonics and why Trygve is kicked out of the States while his grandpa was still frozen in a shack.
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Caption: _______ By Joost Bastmeijer
Check out my photos on Instagram as well! Instagram.com/joostbastmeijer ME