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

Now Museum Hilversum is closed until further notice due to the COVID19 outbreak, it will not be possible to see the best photojournalism of The Netherlands according to the jurors of the Zilveren Camera Photojournalism awards.. But luckily, they have created a handy virtual tour of the exhibition, so that you can see all winning photos (including my 2nd prize Beira shot) from your self quarantine space.

Press the ‘play icon’ in the image by Marijn Fidder above to check out a small preview. If you’d like to click through the whole exhibition, follow this link to see the digitalized Zilveren Camera exhibition at Museum Hilversum.

P.M. Magazin: new work for German science magazine

Some of the photos I took in Burkina Faso have been published in the German popular science magazine ‘P.M. Magazin’. The photos, depicting the controversial experiments with genetically modified mosquitoes, have been published in The Guardian, De Volkskrant, De Morgen and El País before. To find out more about the GMO mosquito project, click here.

To take a closer look at the article in P.M. Magazin, click on the photos above.

Zilveren Camera in Museum Hilversum: exhibition of winning photos

Want to see the best photographs of Dutch photojournalism? All winning pictures of the 2019 Zilveren Camera, including my second prize Beira photograph, will be exhibited in Museum Hilversum from 2 February to 22 March. The image will also be on display in the center of Hilversum town, as part of the same exhibit. After March 22nd, the winning photographs of the Zilveren Camera competition will travel to various exhibition locations in The Netherlands.

To read more about de Zilveren Camera and my photograph that won the second prize, click here or check out the website of De Zilveren Camera. To read more about the exhibition, check out the page of Museum Hilversum.

Front page story about locust swarms in Kenya

In today’s NRC Handelsblad and NRC Next, you can find Africa correspondent Koert Lindijer’s story about the enormous swarms of desert locusts that are on the move in East Africa. For this story, I joined Koert on a three day trip to Mwingi, a subcounty of Kitui County in northeast Kenya. One of my photos made it to the frontpages of this morning’s NRC Next and this afternoon’s NRC Handelsblad.

You can read Koert Lindijer’s ‘most read story of the day’ by following this link. To see more photos, click on this link to NRC’s ‘In Beeld’ Instagram account, or check out the photo collection below. To see more recent work I made for NRC Handelsblad, check out this blogpost. Another photo was featured in the weekend newspaper of 22 February, next to this article.

Canon Zilveren Camera: a second place for my Beira photograph

Silver! The photo above was awarded the second prize 🥈in the most prestigious Dutch photojournalism awards, de ‘Canon Zilveren Camera’ (‘Silver Camera’), in the ‘International News’ category. I took this photo, of the 28-year old Isabel and her children, in the Mozambican city of Beira, which was partially destroyed by the Idai Cyclone.

They waited for rescue for days, clinging on to trees and rooftops, after a powerful cyclone tore through Mozambique and triggered flash floods in what the UN has called "one of the worst weather-related catastrophes in the history of Africa”.

When rescue workers arrived in boats and helicopters, most had nothing more than the clothes on their backs, and their feet were swollen from days of waiting in water. Hundreds were taken to the Escola Secundaria Samora Machel in the city of Beira. Aid agencies were providing survivors with a bucket of drinking water and a large pot of rice, but other basics are still lacking. Some were relieved just to be alive, but said they fear for those left-behind.

Twenty-eight year old Isabel Daniel and her children were stuck on a roof for days before they were rescued. Together with hundreds of others, they survived by drinking boiled water.

The winning photograph was part of a series published by Al Jazeera English. To see more photo and video shot in Beira, of the cyclone Idai aftermath, you can click here. To see the other winning pictures in the Zilveren Camera awards, follow this link.

Polyphony International Photo Festival: my photos will be exhibited in Howrah, India

I’m excited to announce that one of my photo series shot in Plateau State, Nigeria, will be shown on the 3rd edition of the Polyphony International Photo Festival. The annual photography festival is organized by the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira’s Belur Math-a College. Eight of my photographs will be exhibited on the banks of the holy river Ganges, early February.

To find out more about the festival, check out their Facebook page or check out this video.

Zilveren Camera Shortlist: my photos made it to the Top 5

I'm very glad to hear that my photographs made it to 'the best five' in the international photography section of De Zilveren Camera! Read more about de renowned Dutch photojournalism awards and the jury’s remarks on the Zilveren Camera website. Fingers crossed.