Text engl. - »Wie im echten Leben dreht sich der Amateur-Fußball um die Lücke, die zwischen Traum und Realität klafft.« (Simon Kuper). Zu Beginn der Fußballsaison 1995 begann der niederländische Fotograf Hans van der Meer das zehnjährige Unterfangen, durch Europa zu reisen und den Fußball ins iner ursprünglichen Form - ein Feld, zwei Tore, 22 Spieler - einzufangen. Er fotografierte Spiele am unteren Ende der Regionalligen unter Berücksichtigung der Landschaft in der unmittelbaren Umgebung der Spielfelder, auf denen die Tragikomödien des Amateurfußballs stattfinden. Diese subtilen und genauen Beobachtungen verbinden den Fußball mit seinen Wurzeln. - „At the beginning of the 1995 football season, Hans van der Meer set out to take a series of football photographs that avoided the cliched traditions of modern sports photography. In an attempt to record the game in its original form - a field, two goals and 22 players - he sought matches at the bottom end of the amateur leagues, the opposite end of the scale to the Champions' League. And he avoided the enclosed environment of the stadium and tight telescopic details and hyperbole of action photography. Preferring neutral lighting, framing and camera angles, he chose instead to pull back from the central subject of the pitch, locating the playing field and its unfolding action within a specific landscape and context. He was heavily influenced by the old tradition of photography in which a wide view of the action often resulted in elements of the locality being present in the image. Van der Meer has applied his democratic viewpoint across the playing fields of Europe over the past decade, having travelled to every country with a significant history of the game. He began by focusing on sites within the Netherlands and in 1998 he published "Dutch Fields". His European odyssey has since taken him from small towns in the remote regions of Europe - from Bihariain in Romania to Bjorko in Sweden, from Torp in Norway to Alcsoors in Hungary, from Bartkowo in Poland to Beire in Portugal - and to the fringes of the major conurbations of Greece, Finland, England, France, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, Slovakia, Denmark, Ireland, Wales, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain and Italy. These acute and subtle observations of the poetry and absurdity of human behaviour connect the game of football to the basic futility of the human condition“ (rrbphotobooks.com).