Photographer Chris Keulen from Maastricht has been awarded a prize at the Zilveren Camera election, the major prize in the field of photojournalism.
With his photo series about the floods in Wallonia last summer, he won in the category ‘News International’.
Fourteenth nomination
Cologne has already been nominated fourteen times and has been awarded several times. Nevertheless, the profit remains special: “Photography is a lonely profession, you always have to go out and judge for yourself what is good and what is not, make every decision. The reflection lies with yourself, not with someone else, you do not work in a team If all the entries – I believe there were 8,000 this year – you come up again, that’s special.”
Floods in Wallonia
Wallonia, the area where Cologne made his prize-winning photo series, has a special place in the photographer’s heart: “I really wanted to go there. It is, in general, much poorer than in South Limburg.” When Cologne arrived there, he came across a ‘war zone’ as if it were: “The aftermath of the floods. What happens next, as a human being I felt how insignificant you are. A reaction of nature that struck me very much, And I tried to capture that.”