Matthijs Blonk

Biography

Matthijs Blonk followed the film education program at the Vrije Academie in The Hague. He has been making films since 1976. Initially these were abstract animated films, and later more documentary-style films in which he portrayed Amsterdam’s alternative art world, and its punk and squatting scenes. Between 1982 and 1986, he also made almost 80 short newsreel films on Super8 that were screened at the Melkweg in Amsterdam; this work gives a unique view of a turbulent Amsterdam in the first half of the 1980s.

Since the 1990s, Blonk has been focusing more on photography, with his subject being African culture. He has published photographs about this in the magazine Indigo and in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. In recent years, he has also made reportages about indigenous African cultures.