With the football season approaching its annual climax, this week’s picture is a gentle celebration of the lower reaches of the amateur game, by the Dutch photographer Hans van der Meer. Having taken some highly distinctive pictures of Sunday league football in his native country, last year the photographer was invited to continue his work in Yorkshire, by curators at Bradford’s National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. The photograph reproduced here, succinctly entitled Cock & Bottle 1, New Inn 3, 2004, is one of a number of pictures taken in the Halifax area as a result of that invitation. It can be seen at NMPFT in Bradford in the exhibition “The Other Side of Football”, which continues until 2 May.

 
Hans van der Meer was born in 1955 in Leimuiden in the Netherlands and first became interested in photography in the early 1970s, when he went to design school to train as a printer. In his youth he was much influenced by the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and by Cartier-Bresson’s idea that it was the photographer’s mission to try to catch “the decisive moment”. Van der Meer’s earliest published pictures were of street scenes in Budapest, taken in the mid-1980s. He has also taken pictures in the ballet academy, Agrippinia Vaganova, in St Petersburg, as well as a series of photographs of factory workers in Holland. The one constant running through his eclectic choice of subject matter would seem to be an interest in human beings exerting themselves, for better or for worse.

An amateur footballer himself, van der Meer conceived the idea of taking photographs of football matches shortly after seeing a group of early twentieth-century pictures of the Dutch national team. “The pictures were made using 5 x 4...

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