Photographer and filmmaker Kadir van Lohuizen (b. 1963, the Netherlands) has covered conflicts in Africa and elsewhere, but is probably best known for his long-term projects on the seven rivers of the world, the rising sea levels, the diamond industry and migration in the Americas. He started out as a professional freelance photojournalist in 1988 covering the Intifada. Over the following years he worked in many conflict areas in Africa, such as Angola, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. From 1990 to 1994 he covered the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Van Lohuizen made a celebrated series on social issues in different corners of the former empire. In 1997 he embarked on a big project to travel along the seven rivers of the world, from source to mouth, covering daily life along these lifelines. The project resulted in the books Rivers and Aderen (Mets & Schilt). He has received numerous prizes and awards for photojournalism. In 2000 and 2002 he was both a jury member of the World Press Photo contest and a member of the supervisory board of the World Press Photo Foundation. From 2011 to 2012, he created Via PanAm, a visual investigation of migration in the Americas.
Van Lohuizen’s environmental projects continue with ‘Wasteland’, where he investigates how six megacities (Jakarta, Tokyo, Lagos, Amsterdam, São Paulo and New York) manage or mismanage their waste. For this project he uses photography, video, drone footage and audio. This project earned him the first World Press Photo Prize in the Environment category. In 2018, he and Yuri Kozyrev were the laureates of the ninth Prix Carmignac for Photojournalism, where they undertook a year-long expedition through the Arctic to document the consequences of the climate crisis.
Photo credit: Stanley Greene