BIOGRAPHY

Hans van der Meer was born in Leimuiden on the 4th of April 1955. He studied at the MTS voor Fotografie in The Hague from 1973-1976 and at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 1983-1986.

2009
First retrospective exhibition Work & Play featuring photographs, videos and books from the period 1984 to 2008 at Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam.

2006
The book European Fields, The Landscape of lower league football was published by SteidlMACK. The exhibition launched at the museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,including the video Calciatori della Domenica (commisioned by Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan, Italy). Later that year the series was exhibited at the Fotografie Forum International, Frankfurt, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan and the Timezone8 Gallery, Beijing.

2004
Comissioned by curator Martin Parr to participate in the festival Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie. There, exhibited Hollandse Velden / Dutch Fields and the video Flemish Fields and Foot on Stage, a project on amateur football in the Provence.

2004
Commisioned by NRC Handelsblad Van der Meer travelled along the Dutch borders photographing the countryside in summertime. Everyday the photo column Achterland, was published on the back side of the newspaper. The book Achterland appeared in November 2004 (De Verbeelding Publishers).

2000
Founded the magazine Useful Photography, with Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain and Erik Kessels.

1999
Visited China for the project City-bikes in Beijing. Photographs and a videoinstallation were presented in June 2000 at the Historical Museum Amsterdam. A year later, the exhibition opened in the Forbidden City in Beijing.

1995-1998
Started photographing lower league amateur-football games. Published the first edition of the album Hollandse Velden (De Verbeelding Publishers, 1998). A second edition was released later that year, after the first sold out in one month. The photographs were first exhibited during the tournament at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris. In December 1998 the Hollandse Velden exhibition was presented in the Nederlands Foto Instituut in Rotterdam and later, among others, in Kyoto National Museum (Japan, 2000), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2001) and the Centro Português de Fotografia in Porto (2004).

1994-1995
Worked on a series of panorama-photographs in black and white of Amsterdam traffic. The pictures of the sometimes hilarious situations in inner city of Amsterdam were exhibited in 1995 during Fotofestival Naarden. Later that year they were shown in the Amsterdam Municipal Archive. In 2000, the series was published as a book, Amsterdam Verkeer / Amsterdam Traffic by De Verbeelding Publishers.

1991-1993
Photographed workers from various production factories in the Netherlands. Putting the accent on the body-language of contemporary work, Van der Meer showed that in a modern technological society the concept of labour, lost much of its original physical meaning. Werk was published by De Verbeelding in 1993.

1984 - 1986
Hans van der Meer worked in streets of Budapest (Hungary). His observations were published by Bert Bakker in the album Quirk of Fate in 1987 (50 black & white photographs) and exhibited in 1986 during the cultural festival The Netherlands in Hungary in Budapest. In 1987 the series won a World Press Photo award in the category Daily Life.