JOHN VINK YASMINA

John Vink (Brussel, 1948)Like several photoreporters who started working in the 1970s and came to maturity in the 1980s, John Vink became impatient with the apocalyptic stories published in magazines about the Third World.

Instead of thinking of history in such black-and-white terms, Vink's tactic since the 1980s has been, on the contrary, to show the viewer how other places and cultures are already familiar to us because they are part of the total fabric of the world, and to define the photographer as just another participant in the daily round whose role is to make introductions.

Born in 1948, Vink studied photography at La Cambre University in Brussels and started work as an independent photographer in 1971. Since the mid-1980s he has dedicated his time to long-term projects, the first of which was on Italy (1984-88).

Vink came to public attention in 1986 when he was awarded the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography for Waters in Sahel, a two-year documentary project on water management in rural and urban areas, involving migrant and sedentary populations of the Niger, Mali, Burkina-Faso and Senegal.Vink came to public attention in 1986 when he was awarded the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography for Water in Sahel, a two-year documentary project on water management in rural and urban areas, involving migrant and sedentary populations of the Niger, Mali, Burkina-Faso and Senegal.

In 1986 Vink joined Vu agency in Paris, then from 1987 to 1993 worked on Refugees in the World,