Teun Voeten
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.
He researched the Provo movement in the Netherlands,[2] 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.
In the following years, he became a full-time war correspondent, covering the conflicts in Haiti, Rwanda, Colombia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Sudan for publications in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the USA.
Together with writer Sebastian Junger, he made several reportages for Vanity Fair about the mass killings in Kosovo, blood diamonds in Sierra Leone,[6] the civil war in Liberia, women-trafficking on the Balkans, American army units in Afghanistan and the controversial Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa.
[7] In 2001, together with writer Andrew Cockburn, he covered the trail of conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, DR Congo and Angola for National Geographic magazine.
He also worked in the Gaza strip (Israeli bombardments), the DR Congo (ongoing civil war) and North Korea (daily life and socialist-realist architecture) as well as the refugee crisis in the Darfur area.
He not only made photos and wrote articles but also shot a video documentary for Dutch TV about growing up in the most dangerous city in the world, Ciudad Juarez.
[13][14] As a guest curator of GEMAK, an exhibition space at that time affiliated with the Den Haag Fotomuseum in the Netherlands, he organized a war photography exhibition, "10 years after 9/11" that featured 30 internationally renowned photographers covering war, such as Tim Hetherington, Simon Norfolk, Teru Kuwayama, Geert van Kesteren, Mohammed Abed and Nina Berman.
[15] Between 2012 and 2018, shocked by the cruelty in Mexico and trying to put 22 years of experience into an academic perspective, Voeten completed a PhD in anthropology at Leiden University, on extreme violence in the Mexican drug war.
