Nairobi-based friends Marieke and Silvere asked me to take their wedding photographs. They married on the Kenyan coast, during a fabulous four-day wedding party (before there was any COVID around). You can see some of the photos above.
RTL Nieuws: a YouTube playlist with all our reports
As a visual journalist in Africa, I have worked on multiple reports for Dutch news platform RTL Nieuws. To see all of the reports that I have worked on with Africa correspondent Saskia Houttuin (who also has a YouTube channel, by the way), you can click here.
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Challenge Your Professional Life: new work for MENDO & Rebel Group
Occasionally, photography book publisher MENDO also creates books for corporate agencies as Rebel Group. Rebel, a consulting firm that is based in Amsterdam (but also has offices in major world cities like Nairobi), asked MENDO to create a book about their view on the world.
For ‘Challenge Your Professional Life’ I extensively interviewed sixteen Rebel Group employees about their past and their out-of-the-box ideas, but I especially wanted to initiate a conversation about their ‘rebellious’ perspective on the world and their role in it.
The results are now visible in their coffee table table book, which can be bought through MENDO’s award-winning web store. To read more about the book, check out this interview with Rebel’s Lenny van Klink and Wout Korving.
New work: official portraits for mayor of Bergen municipality
For ‘Gemeente Bergen’, a Dutch municipality in Northern Holland, I took several portraits of mayor Peter Rehwinkel. Rehwinkel, who has previously worked as a parlement member and as mayor of cities like Naarden and Groningen, had just been appointed as Bergen’s new mayor when COVID19 spread across The Netherlands. In the garden of Museum Kranenburgh, I took some portraits of him, which the municipality will use for official occasions. Some images have already been published by regional and national media.
New podcast for the Tällberg Foundation, recorded in Nairobi
In Nairobi, when meetings were still possible as COVID19 had not reached Kenya yet, I recorded a podcast for the Tällberg Foundation. Anne Goldfeld, Faustin Linyekula, and Saul Griffith shared their ideas on the future and their relationship with it. All three received the Tällberg/Eliasson Global Leadership Prize in 2019. In the podcast, all winners discover how their respective expertise – medicine, dance, and fighting climate change – are all fueled by “the mystery of the unknown” and their desire to explore it.
Click ‘play’ in the player above to listen to the podcast.
New work for Gottmer Publishers: 'Boer Boris' & 'Wat niet in de safarigids van je ouders staat'
In times of confinement in The Netherlands, I worked on two short promo videos for Dutch publisher Gottmer. For children books ‘Boer Boris Heeft Het Heet’ by Ted van Lieshout and Philip Hopman and ‘Wat niet in de safarigids van je ouders staat’ by Joukje Akveld and Ariadne van Zandbergen, I created YouTube, Instagram and Facebook videos. You can check out both videos below:
The Zilveren Camera exhibition in Venlo, The Netherlands. Photo by Andre Bakker.
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.