Seen, not staged.

Vica Rosario Bogaerts is a Dutch street photographer and writer, born and raised in Amsterdam. She studied History there and had her first desk at the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague. At twenty-three she left the Netherlands for a human rights fellowship in the US Congress, then a master's in International Relations and Economics at Johns Hopkins University. She has been abroad ever since.

She then settled at the World Bank: sixteen years on disaster and climate resilience, across Africa, East Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Western Balkans, and the Southern Caucasus. That career shaped how she sees the world: through the eyes of the people most exposed to its changes.

She first photographed Southeast Asia at eighteen, backpacking with a stack of disposable cameras. It took another two decades before she picked photography up seriously. Her photography is candid without exception. She works close with a 28mm lens, going back to the same streets at different hours until the extraordinary reveals itself. She guided by the conviction that every place, moment and person is worth being seen. Off the street, she is obsessive about photobooks. That obsession became Candid, a publication on street photography and the infrastructure behind it: who gets published, who gets seen, and what it costs.

She lives in Bangkok with her husband, three daughters, a border collie, and a bunny. In her free time she is learning Thai, which is proving hard.