Teun Voeten (Boxtel, Netherlands, 1963) 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.
Teun Voeten 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.
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.
In 2000, was accepted in the London based Agency Panos Pictures. 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, the civil war in Liberia, women-trafficking on the Balkans, American army units in Afghanistan and the controversial Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa.
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.
Six 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 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.
Links:
Website Teun Voeten
