The best photos of a crisis year

“It’s a marathon for a photographer, such a debate,” says David van Dam, parliamentary photographer for, among others, NRC.

On 23 June, one day after twenty thousand farmers protested in Stroe in Veluwe, the House of Representatives debated nitrogen policy for almost ten hours. Van Dam sees everything through his lens. He examines all angles, all the main characters in the debate. During the breaks he sneaks ‘like a hunter’ through the corridors of the Chamber Building. Is there an emergency meeting between group chairmen?

Van Dam’s moment comes just before the second term. In the first term it became clear that the House’s patience with Minister Henk Staghouwer (Agriculture, CU) is running out. His ‘perspective letter’ to the farmers was ‘broddel work’, said GroenLinkser Jesse Klaver. Staghouwer will defend himself in the second term. Now he still stands with his back to the hall. And he stares at Soil, the artwork in the Room, made of clay and farmland. Van Dam chooses position, looks for symmetry and shoots. Click.

His photo has been nominated for the Prinsjesfotoprijs. The prize for the best political photo consists of a certificate and a cash prize of 2,500 euros. The ceremony will take place on 15 September in the plenary hall of the Senate, as part of the Prinsjesfestival.

Crisis in The Hague

How do you photograph a political crisis year? That seems to be the question for the Prinsjesfotoprijs this year. Jury chairman (and Photographer Laureate) Jan Dirk van der Burg laughs: „That is the pavlovian reaction of the photojournalist: focusing on something that goes wrong. But this year, too, a lot of things went wrong. I think there were more crises last year than in the entire 1990s.”

A short summary. The parliamentary year started with the continuation of the longest Dutch cabinet formation ever. The cause of the fall of the previous cabinet, the Allowances affair, is still far from resolved. The corona crisis has left its mark. And climate change is no longer a vague warning for the future, but a reality.

Winter offers hope. A new cabinet will be on the platform in January 2021. There will be billions of budgets for nitrogen, climate and housing. But a month later, Russia invades Ukraine. Inflation rises, purchasing power falls. There is a housing shortage, a nitrogen crisis, an asylum crisis.

Van der Burg: “Parliamentary photographers have a crazy role in this. They don’t necessarily photograph the crises themselves, but the people who talk about them.”

Extra difficult: politicians nowadays have better media training than professional football players. Anyone can take a picture of the angry opposition leader, says David van Dam, “but these are often plays”. Photographers have the Herculean task to show how a crisis really lives in The Hague.

“How do I do that? I’m looking for emotions, or humor,” says Phil Nijhuis, photographer for ANP. Both succeeded with his nominated photo of Dilan Yesilgöz.

It was Climate Day, October 28, and Yesilgöz (then State Secretary for Climate, VVD) had the cabinet proposals for the climate crisis in a briefcase – a favorite abstraction from The Hague.

“Actually a boring ceremony,” says Nijhuis. “Normally, a plastic-coated ream of paper comes out of the briefcase. That’s your photo opportunity.”

This time disaster struck. The briefcase knocked over a glass of water. The usher watches with a look of pure horror.

A funny accident, with great symbolic value, according to some. For example, left-wing opinion site Joop.nl analyzes: “The inattention of the VVD state secretary is a nice metaphor for Dutch climate policy.” A comment on YouTube makes the opposite point. „Symbolic. Climate measures are going to flatten everyone.”

A small crisis portraying a big one.

While the emotions in Nijhuis’s photo take on cartoonish forms, David van Dam’s photo of minister Staghouwer is relatively hypothermic. Van Dam has an almost Confucian philosophy of photography: “You can capture a crisis by looking for genuine emotion, or a genuine lack of emotion.”

The absence of a facial expression forces the viewer to put themselves in the position of the minister. ‘I’m only one man, how do I solve this huge problem?’ might be his train of thought. But maybe you put too much into it and he just waits for him to speak. Or he thinks: ‘Did we pay 200,000 euros for this?’

Impact Allowance Affair

The photos of Van Dam and Nijhuis are perfect press photos. They reflect reality yet are multi-interpretable. This is where the photo of Wiebe Kiestra, photographer for the national government and the SP, differs. His philosophy? “You have to be interested in the crisis to capture it.”

During the March with the Mothers, November 11, hundreds of victims of the Allowances affair walked from Rotterdam city hall to the office of the Tax Authorities, where then State Secretary for Finance Alexandra van Huffelen received them.

The photo shows the human impact of the Allowance Affair. Distrust of the woman on the right. Despair in the woman in the middle. Grief in the woman on the left: “She is begging on it, almost Madonna-like,” says Kiestra. “This photo does not show the size of the group of victims, but the seriousness of the situation.”

Kiestra was working that day for the SP – the only nominee who did not photograph for the press. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that this is the only photo in which all the players of the political crisis are visible: the MP, the victim, and the press, represented by the cameras behind Van Huffelen. Because that is also a reality: photographers are also an irrevocable part of the crisis in The Hague.