I’ve just bought the book, and now here are all (well, nearly all) the photos on screen (via Metafilter). It’s a beautifully designed site – and the photos are shown at a decent size.
From a review by Gary Imlach:
The football in Hans van der Meer’s photographs is at a level below match programmes — in fact pretty much below the interest of anyone except those taking part. European Fields is subtitled The Landscape of Lower League Football, and it shows us the game in its natural setting, which is to say just about anywhere a pitch can be marked out.
There’s everything and nothing going on in these shots. Van der Meer elevates each local fixture by his very presence. His viewpoint is elevated too — implying a grandstand that isn’t there. Yet even as he is inflating their status, his expansive compositions reduce the players to scale, locating them firmly within the surroundings from which — for 90 minutes — they are trying to escape: small towns in Portugal or his native Netherlands, mountain pastures in Austria, the backyards of Bradford and Belgium.
This is football as played by millions, not watched by millions, although the Champions League line-ups in the centre circle and the self-conscious waves to no one suggest dreams of television.
Most of all, however, the photographs, like the programme covers, have a marvellous mundane beauty about them. As the grand narratives of sport continue to look ever more compromised, mining them for moments of beauty might be the approach that leaves us least likely to be let down.
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