Teun Voeten

Teun Voeten is a Dutch photojournalist and cultural anthropologist specializing in war and conflicts. In 1996 he published the book Tunnelmensen about homeless people living in an old railroad tunnel in Manhattan. He also wrote books on the war in Sierra Leone and made a photo book on drug violence in Mexico, on which subject he wrote his PhD thesis at Leiden University.

Early life and education

Voeten was born in Boxtel, Netherlands. He started to take his first photos with a small 35mm point-and-shoot camera while spending one year as 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 Ruhrgebiet in Germany, but also to the impoverished inner cities of New York, where he photographed the South Bronx and Harlem.

In New York, Voeten was accepted by the photo agency Impact Visuals and did his first assignments for magazines such as Details, EAR and High Times in which he both wrote and took photos. He researched the Provo movement in the Netherlands, covered the race riots in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn (1989), reported from the elections in Nicaragua (1990) and photographed the SCUD attacks on Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War in 1991.

Voeten obtained his master's in anthropology in 1991 after carrying out three months of fieldwork using participant observation in a remote community of gold diggers in the Andes in Ecuador.