Cas Oorthuys

Cas Oorthuys captured the growing self-awareness of the Dutch in the period of postwar reconstruction in a unique fashion. His photographs show industrial recovery, a hard-working nation on the way towards a booming economy and a thriving tourist trade. Like many photographers in those postwar years, Oorthuys focused on people. His work is however characterised by the endeavour to generate interaction between the people in his photographs and the environment in which they live and work. Another remarkable aspect is his strong sense of composition: the photographs are conceived precisely within the matt glass square of his Rolleicord.

Cas Oorthuys' life and work were shaped by World War Two and the events leading up to it. The economic crisis of the early 1930s lost him his Amsterdam municipal council post as an architect. He embarked on his photographic career with pictures of communist workers, and from 1936 was a photo-reporter for the social-democratic weekly Wij. When war broke out he tried to make a living with portrait photography. He also forged identity cards and in the Hunger Winter was a member of the group later known as The Camera in Hiding (De Ondergedoken Camera). This group had formed in order to record the liberation, which was expected imminently. When it failed to take place they illegally documented the last year of German occupation with photographic material which has retrospectively shaped our image of the Hunger Winter.

After the liberation, social engagement remained a vital issue for Oorthuys. It is particularly evident in Een staat in wording (1947, a state in the making), a photo-book advocating a peaceful solution to the Indonesian struggle for independence. It was a vain hope, and changed Oorthuys' views about the function of photography. After this, he rarely used the medium as a political weapon. Henceforth, his photographs of people were prompted mainly by human interest.

Although ideology receded into the background, people continued to feature prominently in Oorthuys' photos. This is demonstrated not only by his numerous industrial publications, annual reports and commemorative books dating from 1945 to 1975, but also by some forty travel paperbacks commissioned between 1951 and 1965 by Contact and the book Rotterdam dynamische stad (Rotterdam, dynamic city), published by the same firm in 1959. In 1969 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam invited Oorthuys to stage a one-man show appropriately called Mensen/People. A book with the same title appeared that year. Oorthuys divided it into fifteen thematic groups, beginning with death and ending with laughter.

Cas Oorthuys' prolific postwar production required an efficient administration. All his films were numbered, contact-printed and arranged according to subject in looseleaf books. With some 500,000 negatives and 444 books of contact prints, Cas Oorthuys' archive is one of the largest and most accessible of Dutch photo archives.

1908 Casparus Bernadus (Cas) Oorthuys is born on November 1 in Leiden.
1926-1930 Studies architecture in Haarlem and develops an interest in photography.
1930-1932 Employed by the Amsterdam municipal council as an architect, but loses his job in 1932 as a result of the economic crisis.
1932 Joins the Vereeniging van Arbeiders-Fotografen (association of workers-photographers), founds the OV 20 combination for graphic design with painter Jo Voskuil and moves into a studio at 20 Prinseneiland. He and Voskuil provide photographs and photo-montages for brochures, magazines, book-jackets and posters.
1936 Co-founder of the photo and film section of the Artists' Union in Defence of Cultural Rights (BKVK), and is involved in the organisation of the international exhibition The Olympiad under Dictatorship. A job as photographer for the weekly Wij and the daily Het Volk marks his decision to make photography his profession.
1937 Participates in the organisation of the exhibition 'Foto '37' at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
1944 Liberation seems imminent, and a group of photographers - including Oorthuys - decide to photograph the event. It took another six months for the Netherlands to be liberated, however, and the group later known as The Camera in Hiding (De Ondergedoken Camera) photographed the ensuing Hunger Winter instead. In 1947 these photographs were collected in the book Amsterdam tijdens den hongerwinter (Amsterdam during the Hunger Winter).
1945 Co-founder of the photographers' branch of the union of contracted artists (GKf).
1946 Assigned by ABC Press to photograph the Nuremberg trials.
1947 Spends two months travelling through Indonesia for the Contact publishing company, taking photographs for Een staat in wording (a state in the making), published that July.
1951 Publishes Bonjour Paris, the first in a series of travel paperbacks for which Oorthuys visits numerous European countries until 1965.
1955 Oorthuys and six other Dutch photographers participate in the exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1956 Travels to New Guinea for Bredero's construction company.
1959 Photographs in the Congo for the Belgian information service, and then for Billiton in the Tanganyikan and Rhodesian ore mines. The photo book Rotterdam dynamische stad is published.
1969 One-man show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to mark Oorthuys' sixtieth birthday. The exhibition is accompanied by the book Mensen/People.
1975 Cas Oorthuys dies on July 22 in Amsterdam.