Wim van Sinderen

From 1992 – 2001 he was one of the two founding curators of Kunsthal Rotterdam, specialised in contemporary visual culture like photography. Van Sinderen is a founding member and senior curator of the Hague Museum of Photography, as well as keeper of the photography collection of Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

The Hague Museum of Photography opened in December 2002 with the successful exhibition Photographers in the Netherlands 1852-2002 (book). Each year the museum aims to present at least 10 innovative exhibitions focusing both on established names and new talent. The museum works hand in hand with the Special Collections Department of the Leiden University Library, which holds one of the largest and most important collections of historical photographs in Europe.

As a curator Van Sinderen has produced several monographic exhibitions, ranging from historical photographers such as Erwin Blumenfeld, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Leonard Freed to the contemporary photographic ‘image makers’ Michael Najjar, Loretta Lux, Desiree Dolron, Paolo Ventura, Jasper de Beijer and Erwin Olaf. In 2012 he was curator of two mid-career retrospectives of the works of Pieter Hugo and Antoine d’Agata. In 2015 he worked on the photo retrospectives of Anton Corbijn (1-2-3-4) and Hellen van Meene. He is a considered expert on the life & work of Dutch photographer/poet Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924-2009).

From 1982 onwards, Wim van Sinderen published and collaborated in some 50 book publications. From 2009 till 2015 he was a member of the board of the Silver Camera Foundation, responsible of the competition best News Photo of the Year in the Netherlands. In 2013 and 2014 he was chairman of the jury of the annual National Photo Portrait Award (NPP). In 2015 Wim van Sinderen was appointed member of the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in London.

Wim van Sinderen is an active member of Oracle Photo, an international collaboration of curators of photography.