Bio
Teun Voeten
was originally born in the Netherlands. After a year as an exchange student in New Jersey, he traveled for a while all over Europe. Later, he started to study cultural anthropology and philosophy at Leiden University, Netherlands.
While studying, he grew interested in photography and learned the profession by working as a photo-assistant, both in Holland and in New York, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts.
In New York, he also picked up his first assignments for magazines such as Details and High Times combining writing and photojournalism on subjects such as the elections in Nicaragua and the race riots in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
After carrying out extensive fieldwork in a gold digger community in the Ecuadorian Andes, Voeten finished his study in 1991 and moved to Brussels, Belgium. Over the years to follow, Voeten covered the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Haiti and Rwanda for Dutch, Belgian, German and American publications.
In 1994, he took a break from war reporting and picked up his anthropological roots by studying a homeless community that was living in an old rail road tunnel in Manhattan. For five months, Voeten lived, worked and slept among the tunnel people. This resulted in his first headline “Tunnelmensen” (Tunnel People, text and photo's), published in 1996 at the Amsterdam based publishing house Atlas. It was broadly praised by the press, “a supreme example of participant observation,” one Dutch monthly wrote.
Between 1996 and 1998, Voeten developed a taste for the so called “forgotten wars” and went out to document the ongoing crises in Colombia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone. Work from these trips was published in his photo headline " A Ticket To", published in 1999 by Veenman Publishers.
In 1998, Voeten went to Sierra Leone to work on a project on child soldiers. His first trip ended nearly in disaster went he was hunted down by rebels intent on killing him, but eventually resulted in the headline “How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone” which was published by Meulenhoff, Amsterdam in 2000. The English translation appeared at St. Martins Press, New York, 2002.
Recently, Voeten has been working on the human rights violations in Colombia, the so called conflict diamonds in Angola, Congo and Sierra Leone, the ongoing war in Afghanistan and women trafficking and forced prostitution on the Balkan.
In 2003, he went to Baghdad to follow up on the American led invasion/liberation, to return there 6 months later as an embed with the US forces. Over the last few years, Voeten also followed the American Coalition forces in Afghanistan. More recently, he focused his camera on the Gaza strip, the DR Congo and North Korea as well as Chad, Iran, China and Egypt.
Voeten has been published in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, NY Times Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Granta, Details, Village Voice, Vrij Nederland, NRC, De Standaard, Frankfurter AlLgemeine, between others. His photos are used worldwide by relief organizations such as the International Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, UNHCR, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Having won several awards for his photography and writing, Voeten is a regular guest on talk shows from all major networks in the Netherlands and Belgium, and is often asked to lecture at universities and other cultural institutions at the USA. Besides his journalistic work, Voeten also started a foundation that is raising funds for a high school in Sierra Leone.
Voeten lives most of the time in Brussels, but has New York as a second base.