Hans van der Meer
Brakel

In 1988 the photographer Hans van der Meer gets to see a pile of old football photos. Rather than the more recent close-ups of players, the whole pitch was to be seen in every one of them, with all the players perfectly in focus. Only with the advent of fast SLR cameras and increasingly long telephoto lenses, had football photography changed dramatically after the end of the 1950s. The role of the photo surveying the whole pitch has since then been taken over by television.

The old photos inspired Van der Meer to do his own series of football photos. He began with the Premier League, but after a request from de Volkskrant newspaper in 1995 he turned his attention to amateur football, which takes place outside the centres of cities and villages. “There I could give the landscape its unintentional place, beyond the football.”

The photo made in the rural Brakel shows the reality of Dutch socker, which generally is played somewhere in the middle of pastures, without spectators, on an entirely voluntary basis. The football heroics are limited to the Dutch farm landscape in which it takes place.