Today’s edition of the Cat’s Meow is about European Fields, by Hans van der Meer. It’s a Dutch publication, but that really shouldn’t be any problem for any international readers because it’s a photo book. It has a small Dutch introduction, by Simon Kuper, but after that, the universal goodness begins.
In European Fields, van der Meer attempts to recapture an image of football that he believes was lost with the increased global media attention payed to the sport. So like Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, it offers an entirely different perspective on the game. Not a new one, mind you, but one that we all used to know and love but then lost sight of when every game started being captured by dozens of cameras.
Hans only has one camera, and his trusted ladder to work with. He’s scoured the European amateur football fields and positioned himself somewhere along the pitch and then waited. He waited for a moment, but not necessarily the most action packed situation. Sometimes it’s just a lonely keeper surveying the field, trying to retrieve the ball from a nearby moat, or a minute of respectful silence before kick-off in Spain. In most pictures, van der Meer integrates the football field with the landscape surrounding it and then present it as one.
So European Fields is an ode, really. Van der Meer himself declares wanting to find football ‘as far away from the Champions League is possible’, and he succeeds. Every month, one of his photographs was displayed in the now defunct Dutch magazine Johan, and it was eventually put on exhibition in Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum.
I got this book for my last birthday and I show it to everyone who I don’t mind thinking of me like the football nut I am. It shows football in its absolute simplicity, its honesty and its grassroots beauty.
My personal favourites: page 24, Budapest, and page 19, Loumarin (France)
Europese Velden at Bol.com
ISBN # 9074159877
