Iris Haverkamp Begemann (b. 1989, NL) is a Dutch photographer based in Amsterdam. Her work explores how people build identity and community outside the mainstream — whether by choice or exclusion. Rooted in both documentary and autonomous photography, she moves between observational and co-creative approaches, depending on the context and the people she works with.
Haverkamp Begemann’s motivation is rooted in her own background. She grew up in Dordrecht, within a privileged and predominantly white environment where many paths to power — judge, lawyer, doctor — were laid out early. As a teenager, attending a diverse secondary school exposed her to lives and perspectives previously absent from her world. That shift sparked both a sense of homecoming and a lasting awareness of inequality: while she could question the system she was born into, others had to fight for a place within it. This tension continues to inform her perspective and approach as an image-maker.
After moving to Amsterdam, she found connection in the city’s leftist, creative scene — a space that introduced her to a wide range of subcultures and grassroots ways of living. Her recent series Car Meets (2024–2025) documents Dutch car culture as a space of belonging and identity among youth. In other projects, such as T-Huis (ongoing since 2021), she works with a structurally misrepresented community of Latin-American trans women through long-term collaboration, emphasizing shared authorship, care, and political intimacy.
Her first photo book I Went on a Holiday to the Country You Fled From, made in collaboration with friend, writer and activist Alejandra Ortiz, reflects on friendship, displacement, and privilege, and was launched at Foam in May 2024.
Haverkamp Begemann's work has been shown at Melkweg Expo, Outernet Global London, and Fotofestival Naarden, and published in de Volkskrant, Vrij Nederland, De Correspondent, Hello Gorgeous, and WePresent. She is represented by Czar and works with clients such as the Dutch Government, ASN Bank, Mizuno and Ace & Tate.
Bridging where she comes from and the communities she now works with, Haverkamp Begemann’s photography opens space — for complexity, for new narratives, and for a reimagining of who gets to be seen, and how.