Hans van der Meer: European Fields
The Landscape of Lower League Football
Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 18 March – 17 May 2006
Hans van der Meer, Knippla, Sweden
Take an interesting landscape somewhere in Europe, add an almost forgotten football pitch and some players and wait for the proper moment to shoot a hilarious situation. Hans van der Meer has been travelling around Europe just to document it all. In his own words: "As far away as possible from the Champions League."
The main principles about van der Meer’s photography are pretty much sober and are not far away from Thomas Struth: it is about choosing an environment and waiting for people to fill it up. But van der Meer exceeds Struth because he is not boring. The results of picking out a landscape to stress out the characteristics of a nation are more diverse than taking a photo in a museum (Struth) where the mass of tourists is a crowd that seems to look the same in every big museum in the world.
The scenes on the football pitches are picked out according to the situation. There is more action while playing football than walking in a museum. If we cannot see the expressions on the players’ faces, we are amused by the sportsmen having to run uphill, the almost nonexistent spectators sitting on tractor tires, a player thinking about how to get a ball floating in a canal without getting wet and as we were able to see on one of the video screens – a player fetching a football by having to jump across a low wall into a cemetery.
The numerous photos document different cityscapes, landscapes and environments through which the spectator can track the differences between European countries also in terms of economy and wealth. All of it, of course, being united by football, which is at present considered as a global sport.
As far as these football pitches are from the huge state-of-the-art stadiums, the players themselves are in a separate world we are used to seeing on TV. Also a part of the exhibition, the portraits of men show us, how champions league football is a well designed product. Van der Meer’s guys wear shabby training gear in silly colours. Their physical appearance just cannot compete with Beckham and the like. The selection of photos is far away as possible from professional football as well, but I doubt that all the amateur players lack the good looks as van der Meer’s men.
Van der Meer is not complicating life. He is an amusing photographer, but at the same time still able to keep a distance and does not flood his images with stereotypes.