Zilveren Camera 2019: now on display in Limburgs Museum, Venlo

Until September 6th, all the winning images of the 2019 Zilveren Camera photojournalism awards will be on display in Venlo’s Limburgs Museum. The Zilveren Camera Exhibition that boasts the best photography by Dutch photojournalists, includes my second prize Beira photograph. To read more about my winning picture or the Zilveren Camera awards, click on one of the three links below.

Read more:

• Canon Zilveren Camera: a second place for my Beira photograph

• Zilveren Camera in Museum Hilversum: exhibition of winning photos

• Take a virtual tour through the Zilveren Camera exhibition at Museum Hilversum

The exhibition is on display in Venlo, The Netherlands. Tickets are available through the website of Limburgs Museum.

De Nieuws BV op TV: the first hybrid radio/TV show of NPO Radio 1

Before I left for Kenya, we talked and daydreamed a lot about this concept at my previous employer, NPO Radio 1. But now it is finally here: BNNVARA programme ‘De Nieuws BV’ is the first hybrid Radio 1 show to be broadcasted on both radio and TV (NPO2) at the same time. The broadcasts were already visible on the regular channel of NPO Radio 1, and it looks very good.

The idea behind all of this was simple: talk shows on TV are actually nothing more than beautifully aired radio talkshows, and so you could easily turn a radio talkshow into a TV broadcast. Technically it is slightly more complicated, but there are many possibilities at hand.

The idea of broadcasting ​​"radio on TV" simultaneously has been around for a long time - that’s what I learnt when I started doing more research for De Nieuws BV and later as an online coordinator at Radio 1. I found the best example with our ‘southern neighbors’, the Belgians, where broadcasts are made on both RTBF and La Une.

Just like in Hilversum, there were some major struggles at the Walloon broadcaster. There were claims that “the magic of radio” would disappear, for example (which is largely nonsense, according to my graduation research on 'visual radio'). All struggles and difficulties aside, I think it’s great that a Dutch broadcaster like BNNVARA finally dares to make a move towards a hybrid radio and TV programme, and I’m sure many more NPO Radio 1 shows will follow De Nieuws BV’s lead.

Click here to read more about visual radio, or click here to read more about the work I did at NPO Radio 1.

Interview about my photo series on Covid19 in Bergen, The Netherlands

Local newspaper Contact met de Egmonden interviewed me about one of my most recent photography series on the impact on in Bergen. In the Dutch coastal municipality that consists of Schoorl, Egmond-Binnen, Egmond aan den Hoef, Egmond aan Zee and Bergen and Bergen aan Zee, I tried to visually capture the impact of the pandemic on daily life. Parts of the series has previously been published by local, regional and national news media.

Read more: Care 4 Corona photo awards: my photo is a week finalist
Read more: New Liberation Day work for newspaper De Telegraaf

Our Grit & Grass production is on display in Hannover

Our Grit & Grass multimedia production about a climate change-induced conflict between herders and farmers in Nigeria has been selected for the 7th edition of the Hannover-based visual journalism festival called ‘Lumix Festival for Young Visual Journalism’. From the 18th until the 29th of June, our production was on display, both offline and online. You can still see our production as a part of the festival’s program.

‘Ultraslut’, a production by Helena Lea Manhartsberger and Katharina Neuhaus, has won the first prize in the Storytelling awards. Our story is still on display on the digital exhibition space that the Lumix Festival has created. To see all the 18 selected Storytelling specialists, click here.

New work for RTL Nieuws: France is preparing for (Dutch) tourists

For Dutch news broadcaster RTL Nieuws, Saskia Houttuin and I made two reports from closed-off France. How were the French preparing for the arrival of tourists from Europe? Watch the web-only versions of the reports on the RTL Nieuws website or click on the videos below:

Care 4 Corona photo awards: my photo is a week finalist

Dutch photojournalist and C4C jury member Ilvy Njiokiktjien has picked one of my photographs as her weekly favourites, making my image shot in supermarket Albert Heijn one of the jury’s weekly picks of the Care 4 Corona photo awards. To see more of my most recent photographs, take a look at my Instagram profile.

COVID19 in Tanzania: New work for The New Humanitarian

Together with Africa correspondent Saskia Houttuin, I wrote a piece about the worrisome COVID19 situation in Tanzania. The Tanzanian government’s tepid response to COVID-19 and seeming lack of transparency over coronavirus cases is fuelling concern that it is covering up the true extent of the pandemic, according to five doctors and health experts in the East African country.

You can read the text by following this link.

Update: RTL Nieuws published an updated Dutch version of our The New Humanitarian piece.

New Liberation Day work for newspaper De Telegraaf

For a longer photo series I’m working on, I am following Bergen mayor Peter Rehwinkel. A small part of the series about how COVID19 is impacting different individuals in the small coastal municipality of Bergen was picked up by the most-read newspaper of The Netherlands, ‘De Telegraaf’. In their ‘Stan Huygens Journaal’ about politics, they wrote about how mayor Rehwinkel handed over the first of many ‘Freedom Meal Boxes’ to the elderly Cees Mooy, as part of the yearly (but due to COVID19 alternative) Liberation Day celebrations.

Click here to read the article and see more photographs.

African musicians help with corona prevention: an interview with NPO 3FM

Sander Hoogendoorn, NPO 3FM’s morning show DJ, interviewed me about the COVID19 situation in countries in Sub Saharan Africa. In the live radio interview, I told him that as many African governments are trying to take as much measures as possible to prevent the spreading of COVID19, musicians support them with releasing songs with practical tips.

Artists all over the African continent have made coronavirus songs, mainly focusing on personal hygiene and social distancing. I mentioned songs made by Bobi Wine & Nubian Li, Liberian president Weah and South African popstar Sho Madjozi. To see the whole visual radio fragment, click play below.

PEP Photography Exhibition in Brussels

At the PEP group exhibition in the Brussels-based ‘Peinture Fraîche’ space you can see one of my photographs on display from 18 June to 11 July! If the exhibition is still on and not canceled because of the corona virus, limited prints of each exhibited photograph in the ‘Transistions’ themed exhibit are for sale for an affordable price, between 300 and 350 euros per photo.

The photograph has been selected as part of the ‘Photographic Exploration Project’ (PEP), which “aims at exploring the photographic language in all its aspects, photography being here considered as a way of communication using its own visual elements as pieces of a particular vocabulary.”

Peinture Fraîche in Brussels

About the exhibition:

‘Transition is the process of changing from one state or condition to another. The moment of the in-between is often very special. For this new exhibition, we invited artists to consider ways in which photography can explore this concept. The fields in which the notion of transition can apply are numerous: politics, society, biology, culture, environment, climate, psychology, technology, architecture, and many more. It can be considered in a global perspective or related to one’s personal story, being for instance a formal, physical or mental transformation regarding gender, status or age. This topic has been explored in many different ways by artists who responded to PEP's open call. This exhibition will show the vision of the selected photographers.’

Other photographers featured in this exhibition are Maria Makridis, Maria Kokunova, Catarina Aguiar, Lotta Lemetti, Gabrielle Hall-Lomax, Arnaud Teicher, Kevin Krautgartner, Cyril Sancereau, Valerio Figuccio, Mara Gajic, Nigel Baldacchino, Balazs Deim, Martina Elizabeth Di Carlo, Valentin Marco, Donna Garcia, Dirk Schlottmann, Danilo Garcia Di Meo, Sven Kräuter, Jussi Puikkonen and Dawid Zieliński.

Address & Opening Hours

The group exhibition is located at Peinture Fraîche in Brussels: Rue du Tabellion, Notarisstraat 10, 1050 Ixelles, Belgique. You can visit the space from Monday to Saturday, from 10:30 until 19:00.

My photograph was also used by PEP to promote their open call

We're a 'Digital Storytelling' finalist at the LUMIX Festival

In the 7th edition for the LUMIX Festival for Young Visual Journalism, our ‘Grit & Grass’ multimedia story is selected as one of this year’s finalists in the ‘Digital Storytelling’ category. Together with ‘ digital narrative format’ productions made by renowned photographers and journalists like Cicilie S. Andersen, Anna Fritsche, Ilvy Njiokiktjien and Etinosa Yvonne, our work can be seen during the festival in Hanover. Due to COVID19 measures, however, the festival will run mainly online.

Grit & Grass was produced on assignment by Dutch foreign news platform Bureau Buitenland. For this story about a deadly conflict between herdsmen and farmers in Nigeria, Africa correspondent Saskia Houttuin and I traveled to Plateau State, where we created two interactive stories which focus on both sides of the conflict.

The first chapter of this story is about Nding, where Fidelis tells about the Fulani herdsmen that attacked his family. The second chapter is about a nearby settlement of Fulani herders, who explain why they had to move their cattle into farmers territory - one of the biggest reasons that initiated this conflict is drought caused by climate change.

This multimedia interactive story is made with the Slices storytelling tool, and includes photography, video, text and infographics. You can watch both (Dutch) chapters of the story in the video below, or click through the English two chapters through these links:

• Grit & Grass 1: the farmers

• Grit & Grass 2: the herdsmen

Podcast De Dag: a talk about COVID19 in Kenya

In a conversation with Elisabeth Steinz of the daily NOS/NPO Radio 1 podcast ‘De Dag’, Nairobi-based doctor Fleur de Meijer and I told something about corona virus measures in Kenya and the rest of the continent. You can listen to the podcast (20 minutes, in Dutch) by clicking on this link.

Riding Kenya's matatus amid new coronavirus measures - New work for The Guardian and Al Jazeera

New work for The Guardian & Al Jazeera: With limited resources and limited Intensive Care Unit beds, African governments are looking to prevent the spread of the corona virus as much as possible. In Kenya, all international flights are suspended, and a curfew from 9pm to 7am is in place. The country is known for its ‘matatus’, minibuses that often transport more people than they have seats. In the wake of the coronavirus, Kenyan authorities have issued measures to be taken by matatu companies - fears are that Kenya's informal public transportation buses that carry millions of Kenyans on a daily basis is the weak link in the fight against corona. 

To prevent contamination, Kenyan officials have said that 14-seater matatus will carry only 8 passengers, and vehicles that carry more than 30 passengers will carry not more than 60% of their capacity. But people have to get to work, as Kenya is not yet ‘in lockdown’, and many Kenyans have work that cannot be done from home. For some, a day without work even means a day without food.

And so, among many drivers and matatu touts who are not yet taking precautions, some matatu staffers in Nairobi’s Westlands matatu terminal are wearing face masks as they disinfect their buses and clean hands of passengers. “Many people will not be able to afford to go to the hospital. And if you can’t seek medical attention, you will die. We are taking every measure seriously.”

Click here to see my photos on the website of The Guardian: ‘Minibuses keep Kenya’s wheels turning amid Covid-19 fears – in pictures’

Click here to see my photos and words for Al Jazeera: ‘In Pictures: Riding Kenya's matatus amid new coronavirus measures’

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