Els Zweerink is a documentary photographer. Zweerink is particularly interested in stories about people and situations that are rarely in the focus of public attention.
In June 2011 she graduated cum laude from the Amsterdam Photo Academy with the project Finding Guillermo, dealing with her search for her foster-parents-plan-brother of years ago, Guillermo in El Salvador. She discovered that in the twenty years that had passed since his last letter to his forest parents, his life had been hard and had followed an unlikely route, with few ups and many downs.
In Amsterdamseen we show pictures from two series of her work.
The first shows children taking their leave from their Elementary School Eastern Islands, in a party that marks the end of their primary school days.
The second series deals with the Surinamese association Ring Masters, which holds songbird competitions each summer on a field in South East Amsterdam.