Name Co Rentmeester | Role Rower | |
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Awards World Press Photo of the Year, World Press Photo Award for Sports | ||
Co rentmeester over mark spitz in 1972
Jakobus Willem "Co" Rentmeester (also Ko Rentmeester; born February 28, 1936 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch rower. He later became a photojournalist and covered the Vietnam war among other newsworthy events.
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Life and career
Rentmeester competed for the Netherlands at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. In the 1960s he moved to the United States and studied photography at the Art Center College in Los Angeles.
After receiving his Bachelor of Arts, Rentmeester started his career as a freelance photographer in 1965 for Life Magazine. He first covered the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, documenting many of the dramatic events, which earned him his first accolades as a photographer.
Between 1966 and 1969 Rentmeester was in Asia, where he particularly covered the Vietnam war. One of his pictures showed the commander of an M48 Patton looking through his lens. It was selected as World Press Photo of the Year and notably it was the first color photograph to win the award.
After Rentmeester was wounded by a Vietcong sniper near Saigon, he returned to the U.S. In 1972, his pictures from a travel through Indonesia were shown in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
In the following years, Rentmeester worked for several magazines as a photojournalist and as an advertising photographer.