Following a degree in psychology, 25-year-old Marco van Duyvendijk (b. 1974) went to Rumania to spend a year devoting himself to photography. Wandering the streets in search of things to photograph, he met thirteen-year-old street kid Oana, who was escaping from her alcoholic mother. Van Duyvendijk wanted to get to know Oana but hesitated: did he really want to know what her life was like? It took him a week to pluck up the courage to take a photograph, the first of what would eventually become a series. Not about poverty, but about the budding friendship between two young people from totally different worlds.
In the years that followed, the young man produced the unusual and coherent oeuvre which is now being exhibited, for the first time in its entirety, at the Hague Museum of Photography. Children and young people are the constant theme of Van Duyvendijk’s work, which has taken him, over a period of ten years, not just to Rumania, but also to Mongolia, China and Japan. In each country, he looks for traces of tradition, tokens of change and signs of modernity. 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 area of reciprocal influence is where he feels most 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. Mood and colour are key features of Eastward Bound. Van Duyvendijk 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.
The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated publication, designed by Rick Vermeulen, with texts by Wim van Sinderen, Olaf Tempelman, Weina, and Marco van Duyvendijk (€ 45,-).