Hans Van Der Meer

We would like to share the work of Hans Van Der Meer.

European fields / The Landscape of Lower League Football

Hans Van Der Meer is a dutch citizen born in 1955. He’s a professional photographer since the 70’s. From 1995, he starts taking photographs of low division amateur-football games. He went out looking for football in its original form, as it had started more than hundred years ago: a piece of land, 22 players, and no spectators around the pitch, just a horse in the next meadow. The image is far away from the image we know from professional football. About the idea behind this project he says: ‘Football is a part of our culture and football fields form part of our landscape. There are proportionately more grounds in Holland then in any other country in the world. Even in the smallest municipality you will find at least one club. Taking photographs for my album HOLLANDSE VELDEN I visited over 350 locations all over the country. I was looking for those situations where I could make a combination of a field with players and an interesting landscape in the background. I needed the world outside the field to show literally that football is part of our culture.’ (source official website)

First edition of this work came out during the world cup in France 1998. Hans kept moving all arround Europe and in 2006, an other book came out : ‘European Fields‘, 85 photographs in colour of amateur-football in twenty-two different European countries. Book available on Amazon.

ALL PICTURES © HANS VAN DER MEER