For a whole year, photographer Ad van Denderen lived and breathed the Dutch military. He photographed new recruits, the training they underwent and life on Dutch army bases. But he also took pictures of the army on its mission to Afghanistan and of those who stayed at home. Twenty years after the reunification of Germany, the Dutch military is constantly in the news and that made it a perfect subject for the twelfth edition of Document Nederland, the annual photographic commission awarded by the Rijksmuseum and NRC Handelsblad.

According to the ‘Plan Bleu’ sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme, in the next 20 years around 205 million holiday or second homes will be built to accommodate 350 million tourists annually along the coasts of Turkey and Spain alone. Ad Van Denderen has spent the past 5 years photographiing in every_country that borders the Mediterranean Sea. So Blue, So Blue is his personal attempt to make sense of the vast economic, political, socio-religious and ecological changes taking place around the open space that Europe, Asia and Africa have contested and shared for centuries.

Netherlands, Daily life and school life for muslim children in an islamic school in Amsterdam (during the celebrations of the end of Ramadan).

South Africa (1990-2004). Has the official end of the apartheid in South Africa put an end to the political, social and economical inequalities between the black and the white communities ?

Between 2002 and 2004, Ad Van Denderen went to Palestine to portrait the inventory of fixtures of a situation, which lingers on since more than 60 years. The look is uncompromising: ruined substructures, protection bags in houses...we perceive a Palestinian people who live in the fear. Then, come those bills, which called to extremism. What do we remember? Terror ever causes Terror.

All along 700 kilometres, on the West Bank territory, Israël is building a wall. Separation barrier, security wall, or wall of shame, using terms give a good idea of relationships’ state between Hebrew State and its neighbours. This construction has, from the beginning, raised polemics about human rights issues, or about the necessity for Israël to protects itself from terrorist bombing. This report carries Ad Van Denderen’s point of view on this question.

In Go No Go Ad Van Denderen leads us along the edges of Europe where immigrants try to reach the West along smugglers’ paths, with varying success. He takes us along to the polices stations and refugee centers where , surrounded by their first-thick dossiers, investigators try to determine the identities of the refugees. He shows us how men kill time in pension until a band of smugglers can get them over the umpteenth border. He follows the refugees right up to the barbed wire at the rail tunnel at Calais, where they cut their way through, and further , until they are confronted with the next fence laced with barbed wire. http://www.go-no-go.nl/gonogo.php