Teun Voeten

Teun Voeten (Boxtel, Netherlands, 25 October 1961) is an international photojournalist and anthropologist, specializing in war and conflicts. In 1996 he published the book Tunnelmensen about the homeless people living in an old rail road tunnel in Manhattan. It was published in English in 2010.

Life and career

Teun Voeten was born in the Netherlands. He started to take his first photos with a small 35mm point and shoot camera when he spent one as year an exchange student in New Jersey. Later, during his studies in cultural anthropology and philosophy at Leiden University, he grew more interested in photography and learned the profession by assisting fashion and architectural photographers, both in the Netherlands and in New York, where he attended several courses at the School of Visual Arts in 1989. His first photo trips brought him to the industrial Ruhr gebiet in Germany, but also to the impoverished inner cities of New York, where he photographed the South Bronx and Harlem.^[1]

In New York, he was accepted by the photo agency Impact Visuals and did his first assignments for magazines such as Details, EAR and High Times in which he both wrote and took photos. He researched the Provo movement in the Netherlands,^[2] covered the race riots in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn (1989), reported from the elections in Nicaragua (1990) and photographed the SCUD attacks on Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War in 1991. Voeten obtained his Masters at anthropology in 1991 after carrying out 3 months of fieldwork using participant observation in a remote community of gold diggers in the Andes in Ecuador .^[3] After his graduation, he moved to Brussels, Belgium and started to cover the unfolding civil war in Yugoslavia. In the following years, he became a full-time war correspondent, covering the conflicts Haiti, Rwanda, Colombia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Sudan for publications in the Netherlands, Belgium Germany and the USA.

In 1998 Voeten became headline news in the Netherlands when he went missing during the civil war in Sierra Leone. The Dutch Journalist Association NVJ was ready to send a search mission of fellow journalists, when Voeten resurfaced after hiding for two weeks for rebels that were searching for him.^[4] In 2000, was accepted in the London based Agency Panos Pictures.^[5] That year, he also moved to New York. Together with writer Sebastian Junger, he made several reportages for Vanity Fair about the mass killings in Kosovo, blood diamonds in Sierra Leone,^[6] the civil war in Liberia, women-trafficking on the Balkans, American army units in Afghanistan and the controversial Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa.^[7] In 2001, together with writer Andrew Cockburn, he covered the trail of conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, DR Congo and Angola for National Geographic Magazine . In 2003, Voeten arrived in Baghdad just after the American led invasion and photographed the immediate aftermath of the war. 6 months later he returned to Iraq and was embedded with the US forces for MacCleans magazine with Canadian writer Sacha Trudeau. Over the last years, Voeten photographed a few times more the American troops in Afghanistan. He also worked in the Gaza strip (Israeli bombardments), the DR Congo (ongoing civil war) and North Korea (daily life and Socialist-realist architecture) as well the refugee crisis in the Darfur area. He also focused on more documentary subjects such as daily life in Iran and coal mining and pollution in China . Most recently he covered the Mexican drug war and the Arab uprising in 2012 in Egypt and Libya. Work from Voeten has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Newsweek, Time, Granta, Village Voice, Vrij Nederland, De Volkskrant, NRC, De Standaard and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He is also a contributor for humanitarian agencies such as International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, Medecins sans frontieres, UNHCR and Amnesty International and other non-governmental organizations.

Main publications and exhibitions

In 1994, Voeten did an article about a community of homeless people that were living in an old rail road tunnel in Manhattan. He found this so fascinating and eventually for five months, he lived in this underground community. This research and experiences were written down in the journalistic/anthropological account Tunnelmensen, (1996 at Atlas, Amsterdam) and appeared as Tunnel People appeared in 2010 in a translated and updated version at PM Press, Oakland.^[8]^[9]^[10] His work he did in Bosnia as well as from the so-called forgotten wars such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Sudan and Sierra Leone appeared in the photobook A Ticket To, in 1999 (Veenman Publishers, Ede, Netherlands).

Voeten experiences from his nearly disastrous trip to Sierra were written down in How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone (Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 2000) and appeared at St. Martins Press, New York, 2002. From 2009 till 2012, Voeten documented the drug war in Mexico. His photobook Narco Estado. Drug Violence in Mexico was published by Lannoo in September 2012.^[11] Voeten has had exhibitions in many galleries and museums in Europe and the USA such as Guislain Museum, Ghent (B), Emerging Collector Gallery, New York, Umbrage, New York, PDNB Gallery, Dallas (TX) and the Museum for Photography Rotterdam (NL).

Current projects

In 2009, Voeten started to focus on the drug violence in Mexico and made numerous trips to the flashpoints of the drug war, Ciudad Juarez, Culiacan and Michoacan. He not only made photos and wrote articles, he also shot a video documentary for Dutch TV about growing up in the most dangerous city in the world, Ciudad Juarez.^[12]^[13]

As a guest curator for GEMAK, a dependence from the Den Haag Fotomuseum in the Netherlands, he organized a war photography exhibition, "10years after 9/11" that featured 30 internationally renown photographers covering war such as Tim Hetherington, Simon Norfolk, Teru Kuwayama, Geert van Kesteren, Mohammed Abed and Nina Berman.^[14] Shocked by the cruelty in Mexico and trying to put 22 years of experience into an academic perspective, Voeten started in 2012 a PhD in anthropology on extreme violence in the Mexican drug war at Leiden University.

Bibliography

How the body: Hoop en horror in Sierra Leone, Amsterdam, Meulenhoff Publishers, 2000, ISBN 90 290 6514 1
How the body: One Man's Terrifying Journey Through an African War, New York, St. Martin's Press, 2002, ISBN 0 312 28219 2.
Tunnelmensen, Amsterdam, Atlas Publishers, 1996, ISBN 90 254 0866 4
Tunnel People, Oakland, CA, PM Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-60486-070-2
A ticket to, Ede (NL), Leiden Art Foundation and Veenman Publishers, 1999, ISBN 90 278 1547 X
Narco Estado: Narco Violence in Mexico, Belgium, Lannoo Publishers, 2012, ISBN 978 94 014 0407 5

References