eastward bound

BY WALL DONE, 01/09/2010

If there’s one thing that distinguishes the photography of Marco van Duyvendijk, it is its flamboyant use of colour. Eastern Europe drab and grey? The empty steppes of Mongolia bare and colourless? Not seen through Van Duyvendijk’s viewfinder! The photographer takes us eastward with him on his travels to record an unexpected world: the war-torn landscape of Nagorno-Karabakh, fascinating towns and cities in China, but above all the souls of the countries he visits, expressed in his portraits of faces in which ancient worlds confront the modern era.


After a degree in psychology, 25-year-old Marco van Duyvendijk goes to Romania to spend a year devoting himself to photography. Wandering the streets in search of things to photograph, he meets thirteen-year-old Oana, who is escaping from her alcoholic mother. Van Duyvendijk wants to get to know Oana but hesitates: does he really want to know what her life is like? It takes him a week to pluck up the courage to take a photograph, the first of what will eventually become a series. Not about poverty, but about the budding friendship between two young people from totally different worlds.

In the years that follow, the young man produces an unusual and coherent oeuvre, which the Hague Museum of Photography is now exhibiting for the first time in its entirety. Children and young people are the constant theme of Van Duyvendijk’s work, which will take him not just to Rumania, but also to Mongolia, China and Japan over the next ten years. In each country, he looks for traces of tradition and signs of change. He does not deny his ‘Western’ view of things, but every country he visits teaches him greater humility about his own values and ideas. He sees art, and therefore his own photography, as a means of communication between East and West and this field of mutual influence is where he feels at home.

Marco van Duyvendijk is a ‘slow’ photographer, preferring to work on a series for months and sometimes years. Even so, over the past decade he has produced enough work for a retrospective, demonstrating an impressive start to a career. Colour is a key feature of Marco van Duyvendijk – Eastward Bound. He does not confine himself to any single genre, alternating travel and documentary photography with portraits. But his work always shows the control and care that are the marks of an empathetic and intelligent photographer giving his subjects the time they deserve.

All images © Marco Van Duyvendijk

Wall done MAGAZINE