Walking in a shuffleboard Achterland Hans van der Meer Photography

Titel: Achterland / [fotogr. en tekst] Hans van der Meer
Auteur: Hans van der Meer (1955-)
Jaar: 2004
Editie: 1e dr
Uitgever: Amsterdam : De Verbeelding
Annotatie: Gedeeltelijk eerder verschenen in: NRC Handelsblad
Omvang: 76 p. : foto's. ; 16Ã-24 cm
ISBN: 90-74159-74-5


Photographer Hans van der Meer made ​​a trip for NRC Handelsblad through the Netherlands. His observations, in words and pictures are often funny, sometimes sad and occasionally poetic. Is this our country? Are we this? The enigmatic Achterland.


Hans van der Meer Hollandse velden 

"Hans van der Meer is a very good Dutch photographer. Dutch Fields is very impressive - it is a combination of sports photography and landscape photography. It shows a sort of small intimacy of amateur football - with humor. It is just a great book, very original!'
- Martin Parr, Magnum Photographer

Hans van der Meer (Leimuiden, 1955) between 1973-76 he studied at MTS voor Fotografie te Den Haag and between 1983-86 he studied photography at Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Between 1984 and 1986 he photographed streetscenes in Budapest. These pictures were published in the album Quirk of the Fate (Bert Bakker, 1987, 50 photographs, b&w). In 1987 the series won a price in the category Daily Life of World Press Photo. In 1989 Hans van der Meer worked for 3 week in the world-famous balletschool Agrippina Vaganova of St. Petersburg, on the assignment of the Holland Festival. Between 1991 and 1993 he photographed the workers from various factories in Holland. His pictures highlight that in a modern technological society the expression "labour" has lost a lot of its originally physical meaning. In 1993 over 80 b&w photographs of his were published in the album Werk. In 1994 he worked on a series panorama-photographs in b&w of Amsterdam traffic. The pictures were exhibited in 1995 during the Fotofestival Naarden. Later that year they were shown in the Amsterdam Local Archive. In July 2000 De Verbeelding published the series: Amsterdam Traffic, 32 b&w panoramas. On assignment of the Academisch Ziekenhuis Groningen, in 1996 he photographed the city of Groningen. The panoramas in colour formed part of the album Groningen van A tot Z (Paradox, 1997). In September 1995 he started taking photographs of low division amateur-soccer games. He went out looking for football in its original form, as it started more than a hundred years ago: a piece of land, 22 players, no spectators around the pitch, just a horse in the next meadow. The image is far away from the image we know from professional football. The first edition of the album Hollandse Velden (De Verbeelding, 1998, 58 photographs, colour) came out during the World Cup in France, 1998, and the photographs were exhibited during the World Cup, at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris. In December 1998 the Hollandse Velden exhibition was presented in the Nederlands Foto Insituut in Rotterdam. In September 1999 Hans van der Meer was invited by the Centro Portugues de Fotografia to take panorama photographs in Porto. His contemporary images of the city formed part of the exhibition Rondom Porto in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, March-April 2000. In October 1999 the photographer did a project about bicycles in Beijing, China. His panoramas and his videofilms are presented in June 2000 in Amsterdam and in 2001 in Beijing.