Biography

Roger Cremers (1972) is a World Press Photo award winning photographer from the Netherlands, whose work has been published for more than a decade in leading Dutch newspapers and magazines.

He started his career as a news photographer for NRC Handelsblad, one of the leading daily newspapers in the Netherlands. He later also specialized in portrait photography and documentary, for which he has been travelling to all the corners of the world.

Roger comes from a family of coal miners. He was born in Bingelrade, a village in the south of the Netherlands once famous for its coal mining industry. The underground life in the mines would later on become an important topic in his work.

After his studies of aeronautical engineering Roger started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 1995. Since 1998 he has been working as a freelance photographer.His work has appeared in numerous publications such as NRC Handelsblad, nrc.next, De Groene Amsterdammer, Vrij Nederland, Trouw, Intermediair, Het Financieele Dagblad, Der Spiegel, El País, Politiken, The Guardian, Sunday Times Magazine, De Volkskrant, Het Parool, VPRO Gids, De Limburger, Filosofie Magazine, Knack, de Standaard, De Tijd, De Morgen, Folia Magazine, Bloomberg & the National Abu Dhabi.

In 2009 Roger won a World Press Photo Award. In the category Art & Entertainment he was awarded the first prize for a reportage about tourist behaviour in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former Nazi death camp in the south of Poland. His work has been shown in national and international museums and art galleries and has been part of various photography festivals.

His work has a strong historical and social focus, emphasizing the tension between the dark chapters of the past and the way they are remembered or relived in the present. Irony is never far away.

In april 2016 his first book ‘World War Two Today‘ on the memorial culture all across Europe was published with Lecturis Publishers. Along with the book came the exhibition.

Roger currently lives in Amsterdam and is available for portrait and reportage assignments.