Teun Voeten

Image rights: PM Press

Tunnel People isbn: 9781604864489 (EPUB) 9781604864496 (MOBI) formats: epub mobi published: 09/2010 pages: 336 price: 11.50 euros

During his studies of Cultural Anthropology and Philosophy in the Netherlands, Teun Voeten already showed a taste for adventure. For his final thesis, he spend three months in a gold digger community at the foot of the Ecuadorean Andes. After his studies, he went to document the brutal civil war in the former Yugoslavia and became a full time war correspondent, both as a photographer and a writer. He covered the ongoing crisis in Rwanda, Haiti, Israel and Chechnya.

In 1994, Voeten took a break from war reporting and went back to his anthropological roots by living for 5 months in a homeless community that had settled in an Amtrak tunnel under Manhattan’s posh Upper West Side. This resulted in his first book Tunnelmensen that was originally published in Amsterdam, 1996. The translated and updated version, Tunnel People, wass published in 2010 by PM Press.

Between 1996 and 1998, Voeten developed a taste for the so called ‘forgotten wars’ and went out to document the ongoing crises in, Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone. Work from these trips was published in his photo book A Ticket To..., published in 1999 by Veenman Publishers, Netherlands. The book features the essay ’Neo-Vulturism in Contemporary Documentary Photography’, a discourse about the less glamorous realities of war photography.

In 1998 Voeten was nearly killed during the civil war in Sierra Leone and had to hide for two weeks in the bush from the rebels hunting him. These events resulted in How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone (Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 2000 and St Martin’s Press, New York 2002), The book is part diary of his harrowing adventures, part a detailed history of a country that has been plagued for a decade by a civil war fueled by blood diamonds.

Over the years, Voeten has covered the conflicts in Angola, Liberia, Colombia, Gaza, Lebanon, Honduras, Iraq and Iran. He has won numerous awards for his work published in Vanity Fair, Newsweek, The New Yorker and National Geographic, among others. Voeten is also a contributing photographer for organizations such as the International Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations.

Currently, he is working to document the drug-related violence in Mexico, both as a film maker and a photographer. Voeten lives between Brussels and New York. For more information, visit www.teunvoeten.net