Cas Oorthuys

Casparus Bernardus Oorthuys (1 November 1908 – 22 July 1975), known as Cas Oorthuys, was a Dutch photographer and designer active from the 1930s until the 1970s.

Casparus Bernardus (Cas) Oorthuys, born 1908 in Leiden, was the fourth child and first son of Dorothea Catherina Helena Christina de Stoppelaar (1875–1948) and Reverend Gerardus Oorthuys (1876–1959), who started his career as a pastor in Brakel.

In 1909 the family moved to Amsterdam, where from 1921 Oorthuys attended the Amsterdam Lyceum for three years before enrolling in the technical school in the Timorplein in Amsterdam.

From 1926 to 1930 he studied architecture at the School for Architecture, Decorative Arts and Art Crafts in Haarlem and, after the closure of this school in 1927, in the architecture department of the Haarlem MTS, during which time he joined the free-thinking Dutch Association of Abstinent Students, and first took up photography.

In 1930 Oorthuys joined the municipality of Amsterdam as a structural engineer and was involved, among other things, in the design of the market halls on the Jan van Galenstraat.

In 1932 he, with many others, lost his job as a result of the economic crisis.

Unemployed, he came into contact with the Communist Party of Holland, which he joined.

Oorthuys sought work as a graphic designer and photographer and with the painter Jo Voskuil started an advertising agency OV 20 ("Oorthuys-Vos 20") in 1932, which ceased business in 1935.

He was a member of Nederlandsche Vereeniging voor Ambachts- en Nijverheidskunst (V.A.N.K.) the Dutch Association for Craft and Craft Art.

Oorthuys was involved with and a member of various left-wing organisations in his field.

In 1936 he became a permanent photographer at De Arbeiderspers.

He produced photography and graphics for communist and anti-fascist organisations; and in the tradition of "workers' photography" he documented poverty, police violence, the unemployed, homeless people and evictions for magazines, book illustrations and book covers and exhibitions.

Unexpectedly, he was released again in August, presumably at the interposition of Nico de Haas who, despite having been with Oorthuys one of the founders in 1936 of the ‘photo and film’ group of the Association for the Defense of Cultural Law (Bond van Kunstenaars ter Verdediging van de Kulturele Rechten, BKVK) in preparation of the anti-fascist exhibition (DOOD), had quickly worked up to become a prominent Dutch SS man after the German invasion.

On 5 August 1938 Oorthuys had divorced teacher Gezina Broerse (1910–1997), whom he had married on 31 August 1932 and with whom he had two children.

He married scriptwriter Lydia Krienen on 3 April 1940, just before the war broke out in May.

During the Occupation, Oorthuys became involved in the Personal Identification Centre established in 1942 and made passport photos for fake ID cards, while earning a bare living on an assignment from publishing company for a book about agriculture.

During the war, Oorthuys helped forge identity papers and photographed clandestinely for De Ondergedoken Camera (the Underground Camera; see below) to document the activities of the German occupiers, and also the awful Hongerwinter, the Dutch famine of 1944–45.

During the postwar recovery, he recorded the Nuremberg war crimes trials and the rebuilding of his homeland.

In May 1944, when he took ration cards to the architect J.J. van der Linden and others in hiding, he was arrested by the Germans and imprisoned in camp Amersfoort.

On release, Oorthuys connected with ("the Underground Camera"), formed around Dolle Dinsdag on the initiative of the German emigrant and the former soldier ; ‘Underground’ because the Nazi occupiers declared a complete ban on "photographing, filming, drawing, and displaying persons and things in any other way outside of domestic spaces" from 20 November 1944.

The group photographed in any way they could, keeping cameras concealed and shooting 'from the hip'; consequently the quality of the imagery is distinguished by its haphazard nature; often with tilted, uncentered framing and other accidental effects.

Their aim was initially to document the Allies’ liberation which was longer in coming than hoped, and instead they recorded a severe winter of hunger and resistance in photos that have become the image of the German occupation, especially Cas Oorthuys’ picture of a woman with a piece of bread in close-up.

After the war Oorthuys maintained the left-wing convictions that had prompted his joining the worker-photographer movement Vereeniging van Arbeiders-Fotografen in 1932, and with his equally idealistic friends, Eva Besnyö, and Emmy Andriesse, formed the Vereniging van Beoefenaars der Gebonden Kunsten, the GKf, on 1 September 1945.

From 1945 to 1975 he produced numerous books and reports on the post-war reconstruction in Dutch industry, agriculture, regions and cities and undertook reportage in Indonesia (1947), photographed the Peace Conference in Paris (1948), and in 1950 produced reportage in West Irian.

A variation was published on the cover of Amsterdam tijdens den hongerwinter (‘Amsterdam During the Winter of Hunger’) published by Contact / De Bezige Bij, in 1947, while the now more famous image from this series reached an audience of nine million through the 1955 exhibition and publication The Family of Man.

In keeping with his convictions, from January until March 1947, Oorthuys, accompanied by his writer the educationalist Albert de la Court, travelled through Java and Borneo in Indonesia commissioned by ABC-Press and the publishing house Contact.

In July 1947 the resulting book Een staat in wording (A Nascent State), promoted a peaceful solution to the Indonesian struggle for independence, and reviews reveal its impact on changing attitudes to the colony as the Netherlands tried to re-exert its control, but before the book appeared, the violent Indonesian National Revolution was in full swing.

Photography became a family concern; during the summer holidays from 1951 they travelled to make 28 photo pocketbook in a series for Contact-Photo books, starting with Bonjour Paris with a cover by Jan van Keulen, each on a different country, promoting tourism for a now more prosperous Dutch population.

The compact books were designed around the square format of the Rolleiflex that Oorthuys favoured and several were marketed by foreign publishers in English, French and German language editions.

During this period he also designed five postage stamps (1951) and two more in 1964.

On each of the five stamps, a portrait of a child, among them his own daughter Hansje, is montaged against the background of a typical aspect of the Netherlands, showing the (housing) construction and industry.

For the Belgian Ministry of Information, he covered the Congo in 1952, with further reports on cattle raising in Jersey (1954), followed by stories on Macedonia, Serbia and Spain (1955).

With Lydia, Oorthuys had three children: daughters Fenna and Hansje, and lastly a son, Frank, in 1960.

Oorthuys died unexpectedly on 22 July 1975 in Amsterdam, at 66, having only three months earlier designed a postage stamp on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Liberation.

At the end of his career he left 500,000 pictures, a huge archive faithfully maintained by his wife Lydia, who sold its imagery to a variety of clients before she donated the entire collection to Nederlands Fotomuseum when she was in her seventies.