lacremedence

Photographer

Emmy Andriesse . 1914 1953 .

Beeldroman. Tekst J.B. Charles. Den Haag . Bert Bakker . 1956.

Born in 1914, Andriesse studied on what was considered to be the radical advertising course at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague from 1933 to 1937. There she was encouraged to experiment with the formal possibilities of photography, and with its political role as a documentary medium. After graduating, she became a fashion photographer for Dutch newspapers and continued these assignments in the early years of the war until, as a Jew, she was forbidden to work and, in 1943, forced to go into hiding.
It was only after obtaining forged papers that Andriesse was able to photograph again, working with the Underground Camera group of documentary photographers. Even then she had to work in secrecy, often at grave personal risk, sometimes snatching images from her doorstep of life on the street outside. The precariousness of her situation is reflected in their intensity.
After the war Andriesse worked as a fashion photographer and portraitist until her death from cancer in 1953. (Sadly, like so many women who had worked with great courage in wartime, she may have had no choice but to work in a more conventionally feminine field.) Yet in her “winter of hunger” photographs of the boys’ tangled legs, a uniformed gravedigger, and children huddling for warmth, Andriesse showed people playing the roles that history had dealt them with dignity and humanity.