TEUN VAN DER HEIJDEN
BIOGRAPHY
Teun van der Heijden is a graphic designer and co-founder of Heijdens Karwei, a graphic design agency based partly in Amsterdam and partly in New York. They are known for the design of award winning photography books like Black Passport, Diamond Matters, Rape of a Nation, Latitude Zero, War Porn, Gold Coast, Belgian Autumn, Inshallah, Carpe Fucking Diem, When I was Six and recently REX. Sandra and Teun have collaborated with many well known photographers among them: Ying Ang, Nina
Berman, Marcus Bleasdale, Elina Brotherus, Alexander Chekmenev, Stanley Greene, Kadir van Lohuizen, Peter DiCampo, Zackary Canapari, Donald Weber and many more. For more then ten years Heijdens Karwei has designed the World Press Photo yearbooks and exhibitions. Together with his partner Sandra van der Doelen he teaches photo book workshops all over the world.
Teun van der Heijden studied graphic design at St. Joost in Breda. A post academic studies in Art-Direction at the HKU in Utrecht and Photography at ACF in Amsterdam. He started his career in advertising, working several years as a free-lance magazine designer before starting design agency Heijdens Karwei in 1992. In the early years Heijdens Karwei designed mostly for NGO’s being responsible for their branding, publications and exhibitions. For 15 years Heijdens Karwei has worked directly with photographers designing photo books and photo exhibitions. Next to running Heijdens Karwei Teun is professor Visual Design and Hybrid media at the LUCA School of Arts in Genk, Belgium and teaches regularly at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Graphic Designer / Curator / Bookmaker
PERSONAL STATEMENT
Although we live in a digital age there is more attention for the paper photo book then ever before. Since the invention of the camera phone we have started to use photography as a visual language in a broader spectrum from the colloquial to the formal, a language that has no geographical or national boundaries. On the net we are constantly in contact with the rest of the world. We still have fully embrace and adjust to this new frontier in visual communication. The paper photo book represents solidity, something we can literarily hold on to. It is a tangible object and, despite being a reproduction, it has the aura of the original object, in this case the photograph. The contemporary photo book can be seen as a visual novel. It is with this in mind that graphic design agency Heijdens Karwei designs their photography books.
JAN-JOSEPH STOK
Photojournalist
@janjosephstok
@erafilms
Filmmaker / Writer