For this issue of Parcel Post, we sit down with Dutch photographer and storyteller Anke van der Meer, whose work is rooted in the idea that “stories create connection.” What follows is a conversation about beginnings, process, and the quiet power of everyday life.

“Verhalen zorgen voor verbinding” – Stories create connection.

It’s a simple statement, but it carries the weight of a worldview. For Anke, photography is about the act of seeing, the courage to ask, and the humility to listen. That same belief sits at the center of Rural & Co.: that the quality of the work is important, but connection is what really moves people. This powerful belief is central to Anke’s approach to photojournalism, and that’s why I was eager to chat with her.

When you talk with Anke, you start to notice the spaces between things. The thoughtful pauses before answering. The way she leans into the word connection like it’s something to be handled gently, not assumed. Her photography is rooted in that same careful attention: the quiet work of seeing.

Anke didn’t begin as a photographer. She studied English and American Studies, taught school, worked abroad for Habitat for Humanity. It wasn’t until she was 35 that she enrolled in the Photo Academy in Amsterdam. “I had a feeling there’s more for me,” she told me. That curiosity, that pull toward more, never really left.

Early in her career, she photographed Dutch celebrities for magazines. “I took photographs of famous Dutch men, mostly: famous men are drinking beer, famous men have a hobby, famous men in their bedroom,” she said with a laugh. “But I thought there should be more in photography, which is telling a story, not just making a picture.”

“But I thought there should be more in photography, which is telling a story, not just making a picture.”

Anke gets it. Honestly, that line could have come straight out of a Rural & Co. workshop. We talk often about how design and storytelling are about translating experiences. About finding the thread that connects one person’s experience to another’s.

Anke’s work is filled with those threads. Her camera becomes a reason to knock on doors, to meet people where they are. She’s drawn to those whose stories aren’t often told: refugees, teenagers living between worlds, women finding agency after displacement. “People are so willing to give,” she said. “I’m always surprised by that.”

Anke is drawn to people who aren’t used to being photographed, those who don’t perform for the lens. “When people are used to being in front of the camera, they want to take the lead,” she said. “But I like to talk, to chat a little while I take pictures. For me, the connection is most important.” Connection, for her is built moment by moment, through curiosity, empathy, and attention.

That theme of connection runs through everything she does, in her long-term projects, in the handwritten notes she keeps during visits, in the stories she writes to accompany her photographs. “I feel like a photographer first,” she said. “But the words help. They add something the pictures can’t show.”

Listening to her talk about curiosity felt more like a manifesto. She told me about meeting a group of boys in the north of the Netherlands whose political views were different from hers. “We had an interesting talk,” she said. “And I always think curiosity opens my eyes for other opinions. It keeps me away from sensational thinking.”

“And I always think curiosity opens my eyes for other opinions. It keeps me away from sensational thinking.”

There’s that word again, curiosity, doing the heavy lifting. It’s what keeps her from turning people into headlines or archetypes. It’s what lets her find humanity in places the world often overlooks.

For example, when I asked about her ongoing work with a group of Eritrean teens living in shared housing, she described sitting with them on Saturday afternoons, listening to them talk and laugh before picking up the camera. “They mostly ignore me,” she said, smiling. “And I like that. It’s the 15 minutes before we start that matter most.”

Those unguarded, ordinary, alive moments are what Anke is drawn to. “The big headlines focus on sensation,” she said. “But daily life also happens.”

She told me about visiting Kharkiv with a Ukrainian woman she’d photographed. The city was close to the Russian border. “Life was just…happening,” she said. “Her mother was busy with the vegetable garden, the children were playing football. You could hear bombs in the distance, but everyone was dressed beautifully. I asked why, and they said, ‘Why shouldn’t we take care of ourselves?’”

The image of cucumbers in the garden, nail polish drying as bombing continues in the near distance, captures something essential about her work: the refusal to reduce people to their circumstances.

When I asked what she hopes people take from her photographs, she paused. “I hope they think about their so-called neighbor, even if it’s not their neighbor,” she said. “Maybe next time they sit across from a refugee on a train, they’ll start a small conversation. Be open. Be curious.”

“Maybe next time they sit across from a refugee on a train, they’ll start a small conversation. Be open. Be curious.”

That’s the power of story. It makes the unfamiliar familiar again. We’ve been conditioned to believe that connection primarily happens through headlines or algorithms, but we shouldn’t miss the smaller moments in-between. Connection happens across a table, or in a quiet moment between frames.

For Anke, a possible next project may take her back to the United States, to trace the story of her great aunt, a Dutch woman who became an American Vietnam veteran. “She was born on a remote farm, had to cross the river by boat to get home,” Anke said. “She never married, chose her own path. That inspires me.”  It’s a story about courage, about choosing your own path when the world expects something different. And in many ways, it’s a story about connection too, the kind that spans oceans and generations.

Listening to her, I kept thinking about something she said early in our conversation: stories create connection. It’s a simple phrase, but in her hands, it becomes a way of moving through the world. A practice of slowing down, of choosing empathy over spectacle, of meeting difference with curiosity.

At a time when the loudest stories often drown out the truest ones, Anke’s work also feels like an act of resistance, and a reminder: the future doesn’t need us to be faster. It needs us to be braver. Brave enough to look, to listen, and to really see. Her work asks us to pay attention to the lives unfolding around us. To listen longer. To care more deeply.

Because in the end, the stories that create connection are the ones that remind us we’re not so different after all.

Discover more of Anke’s work at https://www.ankevandermeer.nl/