Marieke van der Velden takes us 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. 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. Her 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. The most recent project is called The Island of All Together. For this project Marieke traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos. Here she invited Syrian refugees and European tourists to get to know each other while sitting on a bench overlooking the sea.
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.