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European Fields.
The Landscape of Lower League Football.
Photographs by Hans van der Meer. Edited by Michael Mack. Essay by Simon Kuper.
SteidlMack, Gottingen, 2006.
176 pp.,
Illustrated throughout,
8x11½".
Publisher's Description
At the beginning of the 1995 soccer season, Hans van der Meer set out to take
photographs of the game that dodged the clichéd traditions of modern sports
photography. In an attempt to record the sport in its original form—a field,
two goals and 22 players—he sought matches at the bottom end of the amateur
leagues. He avoided tight telescopic details and the hyperbole of action
photography, pulled back from the central subject of the pitch, and set the
playing field and its unfolding action in the context of local elements. Over the
last 10 years, Van der Meer has continued this project across the playing fields
of Europe, traveling to every country with a significant history of the game.
The Netherlands yielded 1998’s Dutch Fields, and the odyssey that brings
forth European Fields has since taken him from Bihariain, Romania to Björkö,
Sweden, from Torp, Norway to Alsóörs, Hungary, from Bartkowo, Poland to
Beire, Portugal, and to urban and suburban Greece, Finland, England, France,
Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, Slovakia, Denmark, Ireland, Wales,
Belgium, Spain and Italy. Van der Meer’s understated observations of the
poetry and absurdity of human behavior on the field use soccer to consider—
and provoke a laugh at—the human condition.
Ordering Information
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