Biography

Discussion

No one can better describe Jaap D’Oliveira than his assistant, Hein de Bouter. De Bouter was a regular at D’Oliveira’s studio, who was not just a strict and critical teacher for De Bouter but also a valued father figure. D’Oliveira was not a modest person, nor was he entirely free of pedantry: he knew exactly how things should be and that was the way it was, with no exceptions. The family that De Bouter encountered was by no means a traditional Jewish intellectual family. It was much more a socialist environment, where family troubles were discussed at the dinner table, openly and plainly. Major confrontations were by no means avoided, and D’Oliveira never circumvented discussions: not in his days as a student, not in his family of five children, and at no point in his career.

It was on D’Oliveira’s own volition that decided to become a photographer. Jaap’s father wanted him to have the best instructor to be sure his son would receive the perfect training. That was the resolute task that Elia D’Oliveira bestowed on an acquaintance in Germany. The photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch was interested in having a volunteer, as long as his board and lodgings were compensated. Prior to this time, d’Olveira had worked as a photographer for several years. First as an assistant to the portrait photographer Johan Bickhoff, thereafter as an independent photographer. D’Oliveira’s days as an assistant at Bickhoff’s were by no means overwhelming success. It was a source of irritation for the young assistant, who could never find the right negatives to make reprints and whose mentor’s knowledge of the field was far from ideal. In response to D’Oliveira’s technical questions, Bickhoff only responded with the killing remark: ‘That’s just talk that leads to nothing’.

D’Oliveira was interested in learning and he therefore obtained his knowledge from books. Following his time with Bickhoff, he turned his back on portrait photography and set up his own ‘agency for technical and scientific photography’ at the address where his father worked as a linguist and a stenographer. His technical and scientific photography also included architectural photography, as affirmed by photos produced for the architect J.F. Staal in 1927. The step to seek further training with Renger-Patzsch was motivated more by his desire to improve his artistic insight rather than his photographic technique. Under Renger-Patzsch, D’Oliveira learned to ask himself what the essence of the subject to be photographed was and how this could best be approached.

On the same day that D’Oliveira arrived at Renger-Patzsch’s studio in Essen, Germany, Gerda Leo also began her time as an apprentice assistant. Leo had just come from Burg Giebichenstein, the art academy in Halle with a curriculum based on the tenets of the Bauhaus. There she had studied photography under Hans Finsler. D’Oliveira was able to get along well with his new teacher. Gerda Leo, on the other hand, was shy and no match for the rather crude and harsh Renger-Patzsch. After one month, she decided to quit. Leo’s brief stay was not entirely inconsequential, however, as she ended up marrying D’Oliveira three years later.

Shortly after the completion of their training at the studio of Hugo Schmölz in Cologne, Jaap D’Oliveira and Hans Spies entered a business partnership together. Their technical knowledge, New Objectivist ideas and interest in construction and homes were so much on the same wavelength, that a collaboration between the two was virtually inevitable. Their most important client at this time was the company Metz & Co. D’Oliveira and Spies did work for the furniture department of this business, the domain of the interior designers Elmar Berkovich and Willem Penaat, on a regular basis. While the demands placed on the two photographers by these New Objectivist designers were carried out punctually, the compensation was below par. Berkovich had set the price at Dfl. 3.75 per assigned photo. Yet D’Oliveira and Spies obtained a better paying assignment from the AVRO broadcasting company: furnishing photos for a calendar. While the two men were both excellent photographers, it was difficult for them to earn a decent living. The undeniable impression is that D’Oliveira generally placed little value on making large sums of money, even though the opportunities to do so were most certainly present. His business partner Hans Spies, by contrast, was more ambitious and someone going for the big money. This was indeed precisely the reason why they dissolved their partnership, with each man going his own way.

D’Oliveira was always quite staunch in his refusal to accept an assignment if the subject failed to interest him. This was also the attitude of his teacher, Renger-Patzsch—a quality that D’Oliveira had greatly admired in him. D’Oliveira never photographed interiors, furniture, or architecture that he personally found unappealing. His selectivity sometimes had major financial consequences, a behaviour not always appreciated by members of his family.

D’Oliveira’s patrons in his early days were by no means affluent. Among his regular clients were the architects Staal, Bodon, Elzas, and Rietveld. One of his competitors in this particular genre was Eva Besnyö, who worked for the same architects. At this stage, D’Oliveira’s studio was a fairly meagre undertaking. Hein de Bouter, for instance, only earned Dfl. 4.50 for a week’s work as his assistant. On occasion, there were no funds to pay his salary and he was obliged to wait until the following week. There were also periods when he had nothing to do.

Prior to his training in Germany, D’Oliveira had already done work for the architect, J.F. Staal. Technically, there is very little to criticise in these photos. Yet the buildings in fact figure too prominently in these images, without any spatial effect or openness. This is a consequence of the full-frame shots, but also of the massiveness of the brick facades, which characterise Staal’s architecture.

D’Oliveira’s later work, i.e. the photos taken after his time in Germany, shows he had improved his handling of a subject. Even the surroundings of a building or a cloudy sky could now ‘play its part’ in the picture. It was not just from Renger-Patzsch that D’Oliveira had acquired such skills, but also from Hugo Schmölz. Like Schmölz, he liked to photograph a building directly from the front. D’Oliveira always kept in mind for what purpose the photo was intended, as well as his client’s wishes with respect to either a subjective or objective approach to the subject. He photographed architecture preferably with floodlights, especially sleek buildings, which then created somewhat of a relief effect. Whenever the lighting for a shot of a building failed to meet D’Oliveira’s approval, he postponed the photo until there arose a more favourable moment. On more than one occasion, he is known to have travelled halfway across the country for an architectural shoot, only to find the lighting was inadequate, thus returning home with the message that he would have to go back. It sometimes took him five trips to get the right shot. Many of D’Oliveira’s former students have amusing stories of this nature to tell. He was later less critical in this respect, however, as the costs were simply too high. Of course, the fee that D’Oliveira charged for a shot was determined by the location, but in 1954, for example, an architectural photo cost approximately Dfl. 25 and a 9×12 print cost Dfl. 1.50. The number of prints per shot could sometimes be as high as 100, such as with the showroom interiors of furniture manufacturers.

D’Oliveira photographed without further embellishment: clear and austere. Outdoor shots had to be pleasant—with cloud-filled skies shot with a yellow filter and orthochromatic film—and details well defined. His interior shots were less stark in contrast and softer, by today’s standards. D’Oliveira preferred to take them with daylight. ‘A print has to be blonde’, as D’Oliveira put it. An interior with full sun required an exposure of five seconds, using the lens cover instead of a shutter. One shot per subject was enough. Prints had to be perfect—a demand he also made from his assistants. The cost of the paper was of no interest to D’Oliveira, even during the pre-war years when his financial position was far from favourable. Hein de Bouter now recounts: ‘Had you told D’Oliveira at the time that his prints were weak, he would think that was terrible.’ Even though soft shots were popular at the time, there were still photographers who intentionally avoided them. Carel Blazer and Ad Windig, for instance, printed in high contrast. Ironically, during D’Oliveira’s period of apprenticeship with Renger-Patzsch, the problem of soft versus high-contrast printing was always a point of heated debate between he and his teacher. D’Oliveira felt that Renger-Patzsch printed his photos too weak: his photos were very soft in tone and there was never any heavy black.

D’Oliveira never had much technical equipment at his disposal, requiring no more than two lamps of 500 Watt each. This was in contrast to Nico Zomer and Marius Meyboom, who always transported large quantities of equipment to their location. Prior to the war, D’Oliveira relied primarily on Ilford Soft Gradation plates with an 80 ASA, or the even slower Perutz ‘fliegerplatte’ (‘flying plates’). His only possession at the time was a wooden folding camera with a Goerz Weitwinkel Protar f:18. After the war, he typically used a Brand 4×5 inch technical camera. Later D’Oliveira worked with various large-format cameras, including the Sinar 4×5 inch, Hasselblad, Rolleiflex, and Linhof Cardan.

As a Jew, D’Oliveira lost his independence during the years of the war: his mixed marriage to a German woman was what kept him from being deported. Like so many others, during the early years of the war he made passport photos for identity papers. He took these in the hall of his home on the Kromme Mijdrechtstraat, using his wife’s Rolleiflex. During this period, he also did commissioned work for Marius Meyboom. This came to an end, however, when he got caught shooting photos openly on the street while wearing a yellow badge (a ‘Jodenster’, literally ‘Jewish Star’). It was an incident that proved his determination. At the same time, however, it led to his arrest and the confiscation of his only camera. Meyboom later managed to retrieve the camera from the Sicherheitsdienst (the German ‘Security Service’), on the pretence that the camera was his and not D’Oliveira’s.

Directly after the war, Willem Sandberg, then head of the management board at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, arranged a teaching position for D’Oliveira at the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs (‘Institute of Applied Art Education’), which later became the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. The two men were friends. In the ‘recommendation based on argumentation’ accompanying his appointment, D’Oliveira was described as being ‘very well known to us as a highly skilled professional’. While this was indeed an apt description of him, his appointment to this position is certain to have been a disappointment to others, who viewed themselves as being on the forefront of Dutch photography and who would surely have preferred that one of their league had been chosen for this function. D’Oliveira had never maintained any significant contact with his fellow photographers—at least not with those photographers once belonging to avant-garde circles during the 1930s. Carel Blazer, Emmy Andriesse, Eva Besnyö, Cas Oorthuys, and others saw D’Oliveira as nothing more than a technical man. This was in spite of the fact that, for many years after the war, he too was a member of the GKf (Gebonden Kunsten Federatie, vakgroep fotografie, ‘United Arts Federation, Department of Photography’), which these photographers had helped to establish. In their view, D’Oliveira was an outsider.

D’Oliveira—who began with nine hours of teaching a week in 1945—endured the Rietveld Academy for exactly twenty-five years. For many years, photography continued to fall under the advertising department. It was Sandberg and D’Oliveira who contributed greatly to ensuring an independent department of photography was created in 1956, entitling students to receive a professional diploma. D’Oliveira was not the type who liked fulfilling the role of a bona fide teacher. He initially ended up in teaching due to a lack of commissioned work, but once he actually took the position, he enjoyed sharing his knowledge and experience with young people, as well as discussing the students’ own ideas. He created an atmosphere of talking and doing things together. He gave his lectures in the stairwell. While not an easy man (his instructorship was often plagued by conflict), D’Oliveira’s students would do anything to please him.

Jaap D’Oliveira’s clientele included numerous companies exercising substantial influence on home and interior architecture in the Netherlands from the 1930s through the 1960s. Much of these companies’ productivity has disappeared and survives only in images, many of which were shot by D’Oliveira. This is a major factor in assessing the value of his photography. D’Oliveira’s photos are clear and simple. They possess no exaggerated artistic pretentions and are of a high professional quality.

In part because he combined his photographer’s practice with a highly time-consuming job as a teacher, D’Oliveira’s overall oeuvre is limited in size. His archive comprises approximately 10,000 negatives. His pre-war archive —totalling approximately 5,000 shots—was lost due to water damage that occurred during the war. In his function as a teacher at the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs, D’Oliveira contributed to the emancipation of photography education in the Netherlands.

Documentation