Biography

Discussion

Anyone who mentions the name of Hans Spies as well brings the name of Jaap d’Oliveira to mind. While more ambitious than his business partner D’Oliveira, Spies was reportedly a calm and amiable, even modest man. This is how the architect Hein Salomonson remembers him. Salomonson describes Spies as the best architectural photographer he knew prior to the war. He was immediately impressed by Spies’ intelligent perspective, which was accompanied by an excellent command of the technical aspects of photography.

Spies was also an extremely ‘precise’ man, as affirmed by the records he kept of his activities, comprising in total seven order books dating from July 1934 to February 1973. He described every shot that he took (as well privately) and maintained this practice consistently for almost forty years.

Hans Spies and Jaap d’Oliveira had both received a solid training in industrial, advertising, and architectural photography at Hugo Schmölz’s studio in Cologne, Germany. Central to Schmölz’s teaching was the functional approach to the photographic subject. He adhered to the basic tenets of New Objectivism, a movement that had taken root not only in photography, but also in architecture, interior design, and the applied arts. It was in these fields that photographers with a modern education, like Spies and D’Oliveira, could develop themselves further.

In 1932, Spies and D’Oliveira established a business in Amsterdam. The location they chose was located in a part of Amsterdam where, in the years immediately following, various photographers from Germany would come to live. Among photographic circles in the city, the arrival of these foreigner photographers did not go unnoticed. In 1935, criticism of their moving to Amsterdam and the growing deterioration of the profession was voiced in the magazine Bedrijfsfotografie (‘Corporate Photography’) with the observation that: ‘In a certain part of Amsterdam, about ten foreign photographers settled within a short period of time’. There is no doubt that such comments were in reference to the ‘Nieuw-Zuid’ (‘New South’) neighbourhood of the city. In this time of economic crisis, more photographers in the city would only mean an even greater dearth of work for the circa 130 professionals already registered there.

From the start, however, Spies and D’Oliveira already had a big advantage in comparison with most of their colleagues, thanks to the quality of their modern education. In addition, in 1932 there were not yet many photographers specialised in industrial and architectural photography working in Amsterdam. Those whose activities did include work of this nature were J. van Dijk, J. Goedknegt, A. Meijer, M. Meyboom, and B.F. Eilers.

One of D’Oliveira and Spies’ first clients was the company Metz & Co., in particular the furniture department, where Elmar Berkovich and Willem Penaat acted as contacts. It was precisely at this time that Metz & Co. decided to focus on functional designs, with the furniture department furnished along these lines. The photos taken were, of course, intended to present Berkovich and Penaat’s functional interiors, featuring light tints, at their very best. The technically pure, New Objectivist photography of Spies and his partner guaranteed the ideal reflection of this functionality. In the end, however, Metz paid a ridiculously small amount for these photo commissions: Dfl. 3.75 per shot (the price had been determined by Berkovich). Despite the skilled professionalism of both photographers, it was never an easy task to acquire commissions. The only major commission Spies and D’Oliveira received in the period of their collaboration was a series of photos for a calendar distributed by the AVRO broadcasting company. The two men were able to live adequately from what they earned on this project for some time.

Notwithstanding, Spies’ ambitions exceeded those of his partner. It was for this reason that he ended their working relationship in mid-1934. Spies was a multi-faceted photographer who wanted to run a business that was broad in its orientation, like what he had experienced at Schmölz’s in Cologne.

Although Spies had worked with various assistants prior to the war, his annual production was by no means impressively substantial. At its height, his pre-war production, in 1939, totalled no more than 1,300 shots. It was in this year that the company Bruynzeel had started to become one of his more important clients.

When Hein Salomonson started up his own architecture firm in 1934, he was advised to contact Spies by a fellow architect, Auke Komter (who would remain a regular client of Spies even into the 1960s.) It is not hard to imagine why Salomonson’s ideas concerning architecture and Spies’ photographic vision were so complementary: Salomonson was one of the protagonists of the Modern Movement in architecture, who practiced function, simplicity, and abstraction as important principles on which to base their architecture. Besides Salomonson and Komter, Spies was approached for commissions by numerous architects prior to the war, including S. van Ravesteijn, D. Greiner, G. Friedhoff, G.H.M. Holt, B.T. Boeyinga, J. Snellebrand, A. Eibink, P. Zanstra, J. Giesen, K. Sijmons, H. Schelling, J.P. Kloos, J. Wils, and F. Eschauzier. During the 1930s, many of these architects realised buildings in the Amsterdam neighbourhood Nieuw-Zuid. Besides Spies, one other photographer frequently hired by these architects for photo assignments was Eva Besnyö. In their approach to photographing architecture, Spies and Besnyö were not all that different from each other.

In the end, however, architectural photography made up only a part of Spies’ overall oeuvre. He also received many commissions in the area of advertising photography. Before the war, Spies’ clientele included companies such as Beiersdorf (Nivea), Leerdam Glass, Ahrend en Zoon, De Cirkel, Linoleum Krommenie, and the advertising agency Smeets & Schippers. After the war, Ahrend/Cirkel and Linoleum Krommenie were his most significant clients. Judging by the large number of photographs Spies shot for Linoleum Krommenie, one may probably conclude that very few of the building interiors designed by this firm had not been photographed by Spies.

It was the war that interrupted Spies’ plans to run a large and successful business. According to his order book, he still managed to keep much of his pre-war clientele for quite some time after the war started. Eventually, however, his photography practice began to decline, due to a lack of commissions. Furthermore, as a German national, Spies found himself in an awkward position—though there is nothing to indicate he made any attempt to garner acquisitions by catering to the wishes of the German occupier. Because he continued operating his business, however, the Germans were well aware of his existence. In the end, Spies was drafted into the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) in order to serve his country.

Spies’ pre-war and post-war photo archives both hold an astonishing quantity of visual material (in total, Spies took 39,800 shots, most of which have been preserved). Less significant are the many product photos he took for advertising purposes, as well as the numerous shots taken for Leerdam Glass, featuring utilitarian glass and decorative jewellery, e.g. glass penguins, elephants, and anteaters. Far more intriguing are the shots that Spies took for Leerdam featuring single-edition and other miscellaneous designs by A.D. Copier, such as the glass dinnerware and the glass windows for the passenger ship the Nieuw Amsterdam (1937). Also important in terms of subject are his shots of utilitarian ceramic pieces manufactured by the company Fris Edam (from mid-1947 to mid-1952), as well as a large number of photos taken for the company ‘Indoor’, starting in 1951 (lamp designs, lighting for project installations, glass and ceramic dinnerware), the showcases and interiors of Pander, furniture manufactured by the companies UMS, Reens, and Fristho, and shots that were taken on behalf of the Instituut voor Industriële Vormgeving (‘Insitute of Industrial Design’, 1954/55).

The many shots in Spies’ archive that feature the original, but by now lost interiors of ships form an impressive collection in themselves. Various designers and artists were contracted to work on the project for the interior design of the Nieuw Amsterdam (1937). In 1939, the magazine De 8 en Opbouw devoted an entire article to this ship, as well illustrated with an interior photo taken by Jaap D’Oliveira that showed the smoking salon in ‘tourist class’. It was here that Spies and D’Oliveira’s paths crossed once again—something that would occur on numerous occasions after the war, though not when taking interior shots of newly built passenger ships.

For these commissions, Spies was hired on a regular basis by the companies that realised these ship interiors, such as Bruynzeel, Krommenie, as well as Wagemans and Van Tuinen (Artifort). The ship Spies photographed most extensively was the ‘Oslofjord’, completed at the NDSM shipyard in Amsterdam in 1949. In total, 254 different shots were taken, ranging from the first-class ‘Lady Lounge’ (Wagemans and Van Tuinen) to plastic sculptures of a chamois and a squirrel in the swimming pool.

Spies’ archive suggests his commissions were by no means limited to those (furniture) manufacturers collaborating with top Dutch designers—as his later architectural photography likewise indicates. In the 1960s, for instance, Spies received photo commissions from contracting companies involved in the construction of office and commercial buildings, which in architectural terms, were less interesting. Spies’ concessions in this regard stemmed from the fact that, after the war, his business had grown to ten employees. He therefore had no other choice but to maintain a steady production, leaving little opportunity for picking and choosing.

Starting in the days of their studies, both Spies and D’Oliveira adhered to the formal idiom of New Photography and remained staunchly loyal to its precepts throughout their entire career. To a large degree this formal idiom appears to be the same as that found in Modern Architecture, specifically: ‘free of all impressionistic imagery conveying mood, without omitting elements of emotion’, as J.J.P. Oud described the characteristics of Modern Architecture in De 8 en Opbouw in 1932. Although the photographers of New Photography made use of striking perspectives and diagonals in the early 1930s, Hans Spies was never tempted to devise experimental visual compositions. He refrained from strong personal interpretations. Spies’ vision of photographing architecture remained the same over the years. He strove for an ideal representation of the subject, one in in which a building’s surroundings were maximally related to its architecture. He achieved this by taking highly sensitive shots, in which sunlight and the use of floodlights gave these structures clarity. It was a sunny and optimistic mood, after all, that evoked a favourable view with a potential client. Floodlighting, it might be added, played a role not only in New Photography, but also Modern Architecture: architects intentionally took account of this in the design of their buildings.

From the very start, Hans Spies worked with the cool tints of bromide paper (as opposed to gaslight paper, still being used everywhere until about 1930), which give his photos the character of an objective registration.

In 1936, Spies began experimenting on his own with colour photography. In 1952, the Bouwkundig Weekblad (‘Architectural Weekly’) placed a full-page colour shot that was his (one of the few times this magazine is known to have allowed itself such an extravagance). Despite adding the term ‘Colour Studio’ after his name in the 1950s, Spies never really devoted much time to colour, nor did his colleagues Jaap D’Oliveira and Jan Versnel. The increased use of colour in building design of the 1950s and 1960s was not a pressing reason for architects to switch to colour photos. High printing costs are likely to have been influential in this regard.

Spies worked primarily with a technical camera, certainly for his architectural shots. Later on in life, heart problems obliged him to trade in his heavy Linhof standard equipment for a Hasselblad with a 38 mm lens. Among circles of architects and interior artists in Amsterdam, Spies swiftly acquired a reputation as a talented and modern professional photographer. As well after the war, he remained a highly demanded specialist in these areas. The significance of Hans Spies’ oeuvre lies primarily in the documentary aspect of his work. Many structures and interiors of (art) historical significance in the Netherlands can today be studied solely based on his photos.

Documentation