My ‘second father’ Frans Spruijt sent me to Switzerland to thoroughly understand the trade. Back on Amsterdam soil, via design agency Deunk, I moved on to Mart Spruijt, which served as a springboard for the directorship at Calff & Meischke, where a breath of fresh air was needed. In the evenings, I taught for five years at the Rietveld Academy, with all the icons of that era as colleagues – my further education was thus secured for free. In 2012, a final move to printing company Robstolk. Alongside all the judging over the years, it is slowly time for the ambassadorship.

After 1986, I started collecting photos. Mostly through various auction houses in Europe and New York. I developed an interest in photography through a photographer friend, Willem Diepraam, who already had a fine collection of his own. In 2005, photographer Hans van den Bogaard and I had the privilege of wallpapering the entire Huis Marseille photography museum with photos from our collection.

Ruben Lundgren (b. 1983) is Senior Curator at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. He is renowned for his work as a conceptual photographer, with publications including Empty Bottles (2007) and Tokyo Tokyo (2010). Lundgren completed a master's degree in photography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and his relocation to China has profoundly shaped his career, drawing him deep into Chinese contemporary photography. He worked as a photojournalist for the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant and as an independent curator on The Chinese Photobook (2015), Ellen Thorbecke: From Peking to Paris (2021) and NL Imagined (2023). A retrospective of his work, Flowers in the Mirror , was exhibited and published in 2026.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party has published an enormous number of propaganda books. While researching the history of the Chinese photobook, collector and researcher Ruben Lundgren amassed hundreds of these publications. Using a selection of rare and representative examples, he offers a concise history of Chinese propaganda photobooks, tracing their evolution from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao era.

Willemijn van der Zwaan (NL, 1989) has served as Curator of Photography at Fotomuseum and Kunstmuseum Den Haag since 2019. She studied Art History at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she specialised in photography during her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art. After graduating in 2012, she worked as a gallery manager, independent writer, editor and researcher. She has contributed to multiple photobooks, including Sanne Sannes: Copyright/Archief (2015), Popel Coumou: Paper and Light (2020), Rob Hornstra: Ordinary People (2023) and Inez & Vinoodh: Can Love Be A Photography (2026).

Wim van Sinderen (1958) trained as an art teacher and began his career in the early 1980s as an art journalist and photo editor for publications such as Vinyl and Het Parool. From 1992 to 2001, he worked as an exhibition curator at Kunsthal Rotterdam. Subsequently, he served as senior curator of Fotomuseum Den Haag for over twenty years, as well as curator of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s photography collection. As a curator, he has created various monographic exhibitions, ranging from historical photographers to contemporary image makers. He organized three exhibitions with a catalogue about the curious Hague photographer and poet Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924–2009), namely ‘Gerard P. Fieret – 80 years. ‘A retrospective of his photographic works’ in 2004, ‘The Tireless Epic’ (with Anton Heyboer and Miroslav Tichý) in 2010, and ‘Gerard Petrus Fieret’ (in collaboration with Le Bal, Paris) in 2016. Since 2023, Van Sinderen has been retired and has settled in Friesland.

Since 1994, Van Zoetendaal has been active as a publisher of photobooks and has since published over 75 books. Apart from books on historical archives, which are often paired with contemporary counterparts, the majority of the book oeuvre was created with contemporary artists/photographers such as Koos Breukel, Céline van Balen, Paul Kooiker, Holger Niehaus, Diana Scherer, Harold Strak, Sigrid Calon, Sara Blokland, Marie Ilse Bourlanges, Otto Snoek, and Annaleen Louwes. And with deceased photographers G.H. Breitner, Carel Willink, Frans Zwartjes, Johan van der Keuken, and Esther Kroon. See the curatorial note above for his full biography.