Kees Metselaar

Honorary Lecturer
photokees@yahoo.com

Kees Metselaar graduated as a scientist from the Free University in Amsterdam before he became a full-time photojournalist in the mid-eighties.

His first big story was the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. Kees photographed famine in the Sudan and the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In the early 1990’s, after he had moved his base to Hong Kong, he concentrated on Southeast Asia. He was in Bangladesh when a giant cyclone killed more than 100,000 people, and in Indonesia during the fall of another dictator, President Suharto, and has photographed all over that country.

Kees’s photographs are sold by his Dutch agency Hollandse Hoogte, and he has exhibited in Europe and Hong Kong. More recently in Hong Kong, his exhibitions covered Hong Kong Street Photography, a week in the life of a supertanker and Bosphorus Blues with scenes from the seas around Istanbul in Turkey. He has been teaching photography at the University of Hong Kong since 2009.