Biography

Discussion

When Willem Brandsma left school at the age of twelve or thirteen, he was put to work at his father’s business. Willem took classes in architectural drafting with a local architect in IJlst, named Ringwaldus.

By the time he started out with the company Loman & Co. in 1890, he had already worked for several years as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. At Loman, Brandsma began specialising in the building and repairing of cameras, just as his fellow colleagues L.J.R. Holst and F.W. Schaap. Together they witnessed the development of the ‘Hollandse’ (‘Dutch’) Reflex camera.

For seven years, Brandsma worked as a camera repairman and maker at the Reflexcompagnie (‘Reflex Company’), the company founded by Bram Loman, but which L.J.R. Holst continued to run as the ‘Amsterdam Branch’ of the London-based Reflex Manufacturing Company. In 1897, Holst shut down the company and accepted a position as technical director at Hüttig & Sohn in Dresden (Germany). Consequently, Brandsma and Schaap found themselves out of work. Together the two men continued their work as repairmen and builders of photographic equipment, establishing themselves under the company name of Schaap & Co. They acquired the last remnants of the Reflexcompagnie, when these were put up for sale at the auction house H.G. Bom. Loman’s German patents on the Hollandse Reflex, however, were transferred to Holst’s new employer in Dresden.

H.G. Bom’s auction catalogue has been preserved and provides an interesting picture of the inventory held by a small-scale photo equipment manufacturer and dealership at the close of the nineteenth century. In addition to a studio camera, there were Lancaster cameras, Brabant cameras (one of Loman’s brands), Loman’s sport cameras, and eight reflex or ‘detective’ cameras. Several of these were finished in polished walnut or mahogany, or lined with leather or linen. There was an oak daguerreotype camera and a copper prism camera for drawing landscape studies, with a tripod and a black cloth housed in a wooden box, both already antiquated by this time. A large stock of dry plates was present, manufactured under brand names such as Beernaerts, Schleussner, Weisbrod and Ultrajectum. Listed under the heading, ‘Optique Amusante’, there was a polished wooden (antique) ‘vue d’optique’, i.e. an optical mirror, along with forty optical prints. In addition, there were mahogany and oak stereoscopes, a revolver stereoscope, and magic lanterns with plates. The instrument maker’s workshop included wood lathes, an extremely large transfer machine, a small table cylinder, clockmaker’s swivel chairs, various copper swivel chairs, and a very large number of hand tools. In the beginning, the newly established Schaap & Co. did virtually nothing more than carry out repairs.

For the building of new cameras, the business initially had virtually no clientele. When D. Wilmerink, an amateur photographer in Amsterdam, took the risk of ordering a stereo reflex camera from the two young entrepreneurs, however, the first ‘Schaap’ became a fact, with many more commissions eventually to follow. Around the turn of the century, the firm offered an impressive selection of reflex cameras, tripod cameras, and hand-held cameras. Schaap & Co. also sold the Hollandse Reflex in various formats. The largest was built for a plate format of 18×24 cm. Travel cameras were also built up to a shot format of 30×40 cm. Schaap & Co. was able to continue building the Hollandse Reflex because it was unprotected in the Netherlands due to the absence of any patent law.

There was no need for the two entrepreneurs to elaborate on their past successes. L.E.W. van Albada, a young lieutenant in the military, had invented a new stereometric system at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contrary to the existing systems, Albada’s produced an image in a format that was true to life, along with a depth effect that was highly natural. Around the turn of the century, many stereo systems were impaired by an inaccurate representation of the third dimension: the depth of an image. The image was either too flat or the depth was greatly exaggerated. Van Albada proposed that the distance between the lenses (the lens separation) of both the camera and the viewer was supposed to be 65mm. This essentially amounts to the average distance between a person’s two eyes. The most suitable focal length for the objectives of a camera with a picture format of 6×13 cm would then be 60 mm. The stereo viewer should then be as well equipped with the same. These so-called ‘Albadavoorwaarden’ (‘Albada Conditions’) guarantee an accurate representation as found in nature.

Schaap and Brandsma acquired the patents on this new optical system in France and Great Britain. The very simple construction of the camera’s housing was not protected. The company manufactured the stereo camera as stipulated by Van Albada for quite some time. Just as with the Hollandse Reflex, the stereo camera had a curtain shutter directly in front of the focal plane for timed and instant shots. In the Netherlands, this shutter type is referred to as a ‘brandvlaksluiter’, a literal translation of the English term, ‘focal plane shutter’. Because the device was equipped with metal cassettes, it was seen as highly suitable for use in the tropics.

The rise of mass production, which also occurred in photography, formed a threat to this relatively small-scale company. Schaap and Brandsma, the latter partner being a stubborn man originating in Friesland, felt no desire to have their prices prescribed by middlemen. They saw selling their products in their own photography store as a way to maintain their independence. Because they manufactured primarily expensive and exclusive cameras, they chose for a location with distinction. Their first store was in the newly built ‘Beurspassage’ (‘Stock Exchange Passage’) in Amsterdam. Several years later, Schaap and Brandsma took over Couvee & Meylink, a photo dealer on the fashionable Spui. By the time Schaap left the partnership in 1907, after ten years of collaboration, Schaap & Co. was doing booming business. Brandsma subsequently continued the running of the business on his own. He now devoted himself to completing his plans for a folding mirror reflex camera, that is, allowing for whatever time and opportunity he had to do so: the photography store and camera factory often demanded his full attention. An improvement in efficiency was achieved by moving the factory from the Kerkstraat to the upper floors of the store on the Spui.

The building of a folding reflex camera was by no means a simple undertaking. A high degree of dependability was required of the folding mechanism, not only because the focal plane and the cartridge holder had to be exactly parallel, but because the mirror and ground glass screen also had to end up precisely in the right position, once the camera was unfolded. After years of experimentation, Brandsma finally succeeded in producing a device that could be patented in Great Britain and Germany. The folding reflex turned out to be a commercial success. Brandsma was able to arrange inexpensive licensing contracts with the British firm Marian & Company Ltd., as well as with the Nettel Factory in Germany. During the transitional period, Brandsma was allowed to finish off forty folding reflex cameras that had not yet been completed. Later, he purchased cameras built under licence by the Nettel Factory. The production was not of any substantial size: the license agreements permitted an annual production of approximately one hundred cameras.

It was important for Brandsma, through his success abroad, to as well gain recognition in the Netherlands. A description regarding the advantages of a folding reflex camera can best be left to Brandsma himself: ‘The SENCO (Schaap & Co.) folding reflex camera is, as its name already implies, a folding camera with a fixed pull, with the adjusting occurring on the top ground glass screen by means of the adjusting frame on the objective. Focussing occurs on the top ground glass screen, through the silvered, entirely flat mirror on the surface. The image can be seen there completely in focus and upright at actual size right up until the very last moment, just as it also shows up later on the plate. The camera is characterised by its small volume and pleasing design.’

Making the ‘Hollandse’ Reflex foldable was indeed a significant improvement. A non-foldable reflex camera with a shot format of 9×12 cm is a cumbersome object to carry around. In practice, larger formats are actually unusable. With the development of his folding reflex camera, Brandsma found himself standing amidst the upper echelon of the international camera builders. Prior to him, Frits Kricheldorff (1903), Houghton (1908), and C.P. Goertz (1909) had all introduced folding reflex cameras to the market. After Brandsma (1909), renowned manufacturers such as ICA, Ernemann, Goltz & Breutmann, Curt Bentzin, and Eastman Kodak were to follow. In 1924, Ihagee Kamerawerke Steenbergen & Co. in Dresden came out with the Patent Klappreflex. Finally, in 1930 Adams released the Minex Folding Reflex. The large reflex camera—whether folding or not—disappeared with the arrival of the Rolleiflex and similar cameras. These were more user-friendly and suitable for roll film. Ihagee’s Exakta was also an efficient and handy alternative.

In spite of the licenses that had been granted to foreign manufacturers of the folding reflex camera, Brandsma now entered a period of tremendous activity. In 1914, production was significantly expanded. Brandsma moved to a larger building on the Utrechtse Dwarsstraat in Amsterdam, where up to forty employees built photographic equipment. During the First World War, Schaap & Co. also built aerial cameras, destined for the flying division of the Dutch army. By the time the war was over, however, there was no justification for a camera factory in the Netherlands. The machines were sold to a German company. Schaap & Co. continued with its photo dealership. In 1921, Brandsma named his son, Willem, as his authorised signatory. In the 1930s, father and son Brandsma became importers of what they called ‘film kinos’. The emergence of 8mm film as a hobby for the amateur opened up a new market for sales. Brandsma’s photo and ‘kino’ store was still in business long after the Second World War. The business was dissolved in 1965, most likely due to the lack of a successor.

Willem Hylkes Brandsma is one of the first artisanal camera builders in the Netherlands and undoubtedly the last. He contributed to developments in camera building that made the tripod in most cases obsolete, opening the door to greater possibilities with respect to a more dynamic approach to photography. While not a photographer himself, Brandsma went from being a cabinetmaker to a maker of precision instruments, and in doing so, proved to be a man of tremendous inventiveness.

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