Teun Voeten - Goma, tuba player

Teun Voeten (born 1961 in Boxtel (NL), lives and works alternately in Antwerp and New York) studied cultural anthropology and philosophy in Leiden (NL). He has been working as a photographer and journalist in war zones such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Liberia and Syria for 25 years. His photographs have been published worldwide in leading newspapers and magazines and many other publications. He also works for international organizations such as the ICRC, UNHCR, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. As an anthropologist with a thirst for adventure, a good eye for observation and a certain fearlessness, Voeten travels the world. Sometimes he leaves to photograph a specific (population) group; sometimes he seeks out flashpoints such as the wars in Afghanistan or the Balkans. Occasionally he is there when the spark ignites: in Rwanda in 1994 he witnessed the beginning of the genocide. He also decides, based on his anthropological interests, to live for a while among a marginalized group of people and to record their existence with the camera. For example, in 1995 he lived for five months in a community of underground homeless people in New York to do 'participant observation'. He published the journalistic-anthropological report he wrote about this stay together with his photos in 1996 in his first book, Tunnel People. In addition to photojournalistic work, Teun makes series with a rather artistic-conceptual character. For example, he photographed Social Realist design and architecture in North Korea, he made a series of smeared Saddam Hussein portraits after his fall and he has been photographing political graffiti for years, both in the Middle East and in New York. He has also been working for 25 years on a series about New York skyscrapers, recorded with a technical camera in black and white. Cities such as Charleroi and Detroit were also the subject of his classical architectural photography. Between 2009 and 2012, Teun photographed the drug war in Mexico, which led to the publication Narco Estado. Drug Violence in Mexico. He is currently working on a dissertation on extreme Mexican violence.