Teun Voeten Bio

Teun Voeten
was originally born in the Netherlands. After a year as an exchange student in New Jersey,he started to study biology but after a year switched to 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 1989.

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 Provo movement in the Netherlands, 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 received his Masters in cultural anthropology 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 book ‘Tunnelmensen’ (1996, Atlas Publishers, Amsterdam). It was broadly praised by the press, 'a supreme example of participant observation,' one Dutch monthly wrote. 'Tunnel People' appeared September 2010 in a translated and updated version at PM Press, Oakland.

Between 1996 and 1998, Voeten developed a taste for the so called “forgotten wars” and reported from Colombia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone. Work from these trips was published in his photo book 'A Ticket To’ (1999, 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 his book ‘How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone’ (2000 Meulenhoff Publishers). The English translation appeared at St. Martins Press, New York, 2002.

In 2000 and the years to come, Voeten was 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 army.

Over the last few years, Voeten also followed the Coalition forces in Afghanistan, the ongoing events in the Gaza strip, the DR Congo and North Korea as well as Chad (Darfur crisis), Iran (daily life), China (pollution) and more recently, in 2012, the Arab Spring in Egypt en Libya, the war in Syria (2013, 2015) and the front lines with ISIS in Iraq (2017).

Voeten has been published in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, NY Times Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Newsweek, Time, NRC,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 and is a sought after lecturer at universities and cultural institutions worldwide.