Marieke van der Velden is a renowned photojournalist and documentary maker. NGOs like UNICEF have sent her on more than 40 journeys around the world to photograph their projects and campaigns. Together with her filmmaking husband Philip Brink, she also takes on one documentary project annually.
The purpose of these documentaries is to project a more nuanced image of the way we look at each other and the world around us. Their work is centered on places which receive a lot of news coverage, but focusing on different topics than the news covers, the everyday, the commonplace, the ordinary.
In Iraq she portrayed people around the question ‘how are you doing?’ In Kabul she photographed Afghans at their favorite place of the city. In Lebanon she asked Syrian refugees questions on behalf of her Facebook friends and posted the filmed answers on her friends timeline.
The most recent project is called The Island of All Together. For this project Philip and Marieke traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos. Here they invited Syrian refugees and European tourists to get to know each other while sitting on a bench overlooking the sea. The resulting conversations were filmed and edited into a short documentary.
It is clear that this different approach to understand the world is catching on, as each and every one of these projects has gotten a fair share of global exposure! On October the 17th Marieke will take you along on an exciting journey past her projects where she contrasts everyday life with the extremes you see on the news, giving you the opportunity to reshape your own ideas about this world.