Cas Oorthuys

A member of the so-called New Photography generation and a major figure in Dutch photography, Cas Oorthuys (1908-1975) travelled the world from the interwar years to the 1970s. Through a unique testimony of nearly 500,000 photographs, most of them in 6×6 format, his images blend the small and the large history. He joined the resistance during the Second World War and continued to take secret photos of clandestine meetings, the famine in Amsterdam and the Liberation.
After the war, his photographs give a glimpse of recent social and geographical changes through industry, the working class and peasant worlds, the urbanization of large cities such as New York or Paris, the end of the colonies in Southeast Asia or the small villages of Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Through an extremely masterful framing, these snapshots show us the emergence of modern society. Oorthuys takes a free, poetic and benevolent look at his subjects.

This body of work, presented in the form of contact sheets made by the artist and his wife Lydia, and punctuated by close-up images, offers a selection of nearly 500 photographs from the archives of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam.