Date: 10-04-2005
Owning Institution: National Museum of Photography
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     Now    

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 Speed Graphic Cameras and were taken from the roof of the stand. You had an overview of the whole spectacle including the picth to the edges, the flags and spectators as well as the landscape in the background. I thought they were beautiful. They said so much about the space in which football is played, something I believe that is very important to understanding the game.”
“At this time, two important things happened. I was commissioned to photograph the football team Ajax, and I was also commissioned by a newspaper to photograph Dutch amateur league football. I started in black and white, using a 6 x 9 camera, but I thought it was a colour subject, so I switched to colour. I then began to photograph further and further down the amateur leagues. The games became more amateur, the pitches more rudimentary, often with the players and no spectators and and just a horse in the next meadow and trees in the background.”

Press football photographers generally take up a position behind one of the goals and shoot from low down, to place the viewer of the picture as close to the centre of the scoring action as possible. But Hans van der Meer prefers to remain somewhat detached from the drama of the game. He takes his pictures perched on a stepladder placed a little behind one of the sidelines, which enables him to show not just the football match, but also the landscape in which it takes place. His pictures are frequently comical but they are also poignantly accurate. The photographs he has taken of Dutch amateur football are unmistakably Dutch, catching the flatness of the Netherlands, the particular character of its suburban architecture and the ubiquity of its canals (from which, periodically, the players in those pictures are shown attempting to retrieve a misdirected ball). Likewise, his pictures of Sunday league football in and around Halifax carry the unmistakeable imprint of a certain time and place. The match shown in the picture reproduced here is taking place on a pitch with a pronounced slope, on the fringes of a town somewhere in the Yorkshire dales. A road lined with parked cars runs alongside the field of play. Open country is visible in the distance. On the horizon there are farm buildings set amid fields, demarcated by dry stone walls, where sheep graze. Behind the pitch, directly opposite van der Meer’s camera, there is a walled cemetery, graves visible within. Present lives are being lived out in the immediate shadow of the past.

Within this larger perspective, van der Meer  frames a moment of comedy. He shows us the bathetic aftermath of a goal. One team is in blue, the other in red and black stripes. The blues’ defenders have just conceded what would appear to have been a rather soft goal. No fewer than three of them lie on the ground, while a striker from the opposing side trots back nonchalantly to receive the congratulations of his team-mates as they converge on him. The blues’ goalkeeper, a large man kitted out in a yellow and black striped shirt that makes him somewhat resemble a human wasp, points a recriminating finger up field. Perhaps he means to indicate the point at which he feels the opposition striker might have been more effectively closed down. His slightly absurd air of forlorn indignation is enhanced by the back-to-front baseball cap that he wears – a sartorial affectation of American street-wise youth.

The elevated vantage point adopted by van der Meer reminds me of the paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp – an influence which the photographer has himself acknowledged. Avercamp also specialised in depicting people taking exercise during their leisure moments, and he tended to paint scenes taking place on the fringes of town. His favoured subject was skaters, who often fall, sometimes through the ice itself, and thus exemplify the folly of man. As Van der Meer’s prone footballers do, in their own way, although they are not viewed through the lens of seventeenth-century Dutch morality. They seem reassuringly human, and fallible.

Four spectators are visible on the far touchline. One of these may be Tim Breeden, who manages the Cock and Bottle – the team in blue – who spoke to me briefly on the phone about his memories of the game. He says he likes Hand van der Meer’s photographs but would prefer to forget the moment perpetuated in this particular picture. “It was one of those Sunday morning things. Craig Sunderland, our goalie, is actually very good, but he had no chance, one of theirs just sliced through our defence, he went past two or three as if they weren’t there. I suppose it was my fault. I’d only picked the back four five minutes before the game, and they didn’t work together at all. It was a disastrous game for us, we were thrashed.” Despite the defeat, however, he feels secure in his position as manager: “I’m the only fool who will do it.”