Biography

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Lood van Bennekom became involved in photography by chance. He learned the profession in Paris through Berenice Abbott, a student of Man Ray. Van Bennekom was initially hired to do electrical work in Abbot’s darkroom. It was she who sparked his enthusiasm for photography and eventually took him on as a photographic assistant. Van Bennekom assisted Abbot with a variety of tasks, including the systematisation of the archive of the French photographer Eugène Atget. In Abbot’s photobook The World of Atget, published in 1964, she mentions Van Bennekom: ‘To preserve the plates, my young Dutch assistant Lood van Bennekom and I cleaned each one, placed it in a glassine envelope, then numbered and classified them all. I had not realized the extent of Atget’s work, for this operation took months.’

Van Bennekom started out as Abbot’s assistant, but for the most part he was an autodidact. He was undoubtedly influenced by Abbott, Eugène Atget, and other photographers working in Paris during the second half of the 1920s. Van Bennekom’s primary source of learning, however, was practical experience. In his view, his days as a press photographer working for the Dutch socialist newspaper Het Volk served as a good training ground, ‘ therefore one responds quickly’’. As a corporate photographer—first with Philips and later with Van Leer—Van Bennekom gained a thorough understanding of the technical aspects of photography.

Van Bennekom would evolve into a photographer who practiced the design and technique of New Photography, something not entirely unexpected when considering the time he spent learning from Abbot in Paris. Van Bennekom’s endorsement of ideas espoused by the New Photography is evident in his entry to the exhibition Foto ’37—a close-up of a zebra’s head, transformed into a nearly abstract representation of black and white stripes—as well as photos featured in magazines such as Filmliga (‘Film League’), De Groene Amsterdammer (‘The Green Amsterdammer’), and various international photographic yearbooks.

After his time in Paris, Van Bennekom was able to find work rather quickly back in the Netherlands, despite the recession. As a photographer with a perspective that was modern, plenty of options were open to him in new areas of photography, such as advertising, press and corporate photography. In the 1930s, Van Bennekom shot photos on assignment for the advertising agency Van Alfen, to be used in campaigns such as ‘Brick roads, good roads’ and ‘Leather soles, healthy soles’. Photographic prints from this period are a rarity, as Van Bennekom’s archive prior to 1946 was entirely lost as a result of water damage.

While Van Bennekom had no shortage of clients, it appears he toyed with the idea of moving to the United States in the second half of the 1930s, In 1937, Abbot replied from New York to a letter she had received Van Bennekom. In her response, she writes that Kertesz is also in New York and that she plans to ask his opinion regarding the possibility of Van Bennekom establishing a studio of his own in the city. She nevertheless warns of the difficulty to get one’s feet on the ground as a photographer in the US: “From my own observations I should say, it is far, very far from easy to get a footing here. There is terrific and vast competition. Even with luck, business perseverance and having something specially good, you would surely need to plan on spending several years to get a real start. That is merely my honest opinion. What do you expect of the capitalist system anyway? Hard labour and prostitution of your work.”

Throughout his career, Van Bennekom continued to do work in the field of advertising photography. He not only received commissions from advertising agencies, but also directly from corporate clients, such as the beer brewing companies Amstel and Heineken, the ‘Houtvoorlichting’ (‘Wood Information’), Douwe Egberts, Verkade, Brabantia, and the ‘Keuringsdienst voor Waren’ (‘Department of Product Safety’). Philips was also one of his regular clients.

Immediately after World War II, Van Bennekom began working for the magazine Ons Vrije Nederland (‘Our Free Netherlands’), including reportages on the Dutch painting forger Han van Meegeren, the anti-tuberculosis campaign, and the Dutch steel manufacturer Hoogovens. His name was typically mentioned alongside the photos appearing in this weekly magazine, occasionally with the addition of ‘ABC Press’. Several of Van Bennekom’s photos, however, were published without citation of authorship. A number of reportages—e.g. on the topic of Canadians still residing in the Netherlands after the war and on the Bureau voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (‘Office of War Documentation’)—can be attributed to him based on his own notations. In terms of layout and subject, Van Bennekom’s journalistic reportages, e.g. employees at work in a particular factory, resemble reportages produced by André Kertesz for the French pictorial magazine Vu in the late 1920s.

During his trip to Southeast Asia in 1946, Van Bennekom made reportages on the landscape and the people. He was particularly interested in their day-to-day activities. Van Bennekom’s negatives and prints for the reportages produced in the Dutch East Indies on assignment for the RVD (Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst, ‘Netherlands Government Information Service’) in 1948 en 1949 might just as well be considered lost. Back in the Netherlands, he began doing reportages in collaboration with the journalist Ben Koster, covering all kinds of topics, e.g. a reportage in the magazine Revue about Montmartre, a café built by artists in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, many of these reportages are difficult to trace, as—even as late as the 1950s—the names of photographers and writers were still often left unmentioned. Van Bennekom developed the ideas for these reportages himself, initially together with Koster, and later with his wife, Tosca. He would then go out and try to sell them to illustrated magazines. In collaboration with Tosca Leenders, Van Bennekom began to focus on women’s magazines, producing reportages on textile art, the working woman, and fashion.

Van Bennekom had already shown an interest in fashion during his time in Paris, then making his own swimsuit designs. In the years after WWII, he produced a number of reportages that concerned fashion. By the 1950s, however, his attention shifted almost entirely to fashion photography. During these years, French fashion designers were again the trendsetters in the fashion world. They made frequent visits to the Netherlands to show their new collections, accompanied by their models. Van Bennekom produced photo reportages on the fashion shows put on by designers such as Hubert de Givenchy, Jacques Griffes, and Jacques Fath, which were held at the Carlton and Victoria hotels in Amsterdam, and the Kurhaus Hotel in Scheveningen.

In the 1950s, the Netherlands experienced the emergence of its own haute couture and a boom in the clothing industry. In emulation of the fashion industries in Italy and the US, the Dutch clothing manufacturers likewise focused on leisure clothing and teenage fashion wear. Both the couturiers and the clothing manufacturers regularly put on fashion shows. It became standard practice to have their collections photographed and subsequently published in newspapers, magazines, and sales catalogues. Inspired by these developments, Van Bennekom decided to take his camera and follow the Dutch fashion industry.

Max Heymans was among the first couturiers in the Netherlands. He began as a hat designer circa 1948 and, in the 1950s, expanded his collection with dress suits and dresses. Several years later, Tim Bönig and Peter Voorn likewise gingerly began as hat designers, subsequently making a name as couturiers. Van Bennekom photographed fashion shows put on by all three designers, but also shows by Ferry Offerman, Dick Holthaus, Edgar Vos, as well as various clothing manufacturers, including Schuttersveld, Vico, and Sturka. Van Bennekom’s photos were featured regularly in Elseviers Weekblad and Elegance, alongside photos by Godfried de Groot, Lou van Kollem, Marius Meijboom, and Hans Dukkers.

Van Bennekom’s fashion photos follow the general line in fashion photography. Typical of the 1950s are the elegant, ballerina-like poses of the models, as found in photos by Irving Penn and Henry Clarke of the same period. In the 1960s, this style was replaced by a more playful touch, as encountered in the work of David Bailey and Richard Avedon, and introduced in the Netherlands by Paul Huf. Such playfulness was achieved through the increased informality of the models’ poses, different kinds of camera angles (both high and low), and the inclusion of amusing backdrops and accessories.

In addition to journalistic reportages featuring fashion shows, Van Bennekom as well photographed fashion collections on assignment for couturiers and clothing firms, but also for newspapers and magazines. These shots were made in the studio, where a carefully selected background, professional lighting, and a highly conceived composition could be used to show the clothing at its best. Van Bennekom also produced fashion reportages ‘on location’. He chose a wide variety of settings for his backgrounds, e.g. a painting studio, a modern furnished home, the Keukenhof, Lake Braassem, Amsterdam’s historic harbour area, a manège, a beer brewery, and a film studio. On occasion, Van Bennekom also added narrative elements to these ‘location’ shots. In 1960, for instance, an original reportage on teenage fashion featured in the magazine Elegance was shot by Van Bennekom at an Amsterdam film studio, with the models made to resemble people acting in a film. As such, Van Bennekom was one of the first photographers in the Netherlands to present fashion in this way. These narrative reportages appeared more frequently in the luxury publication Elegance than the weekly magazine Elseviers Weekblad, which was printed on newsprint paper.

Lood van Bennekom became a staff photographer for the fashion and hat designer Peter Voorn and the shoe manufacturer Bata International, with fashion accessories becoming his specialty. By applying special lighting techniques, he was able to show the structures of different materials in detail. He was able to create original photos by using a simple composition for one photo and introducing a new setting for the next. Both Voorn and Bata gave Van Bennekom total freedom in the realisation of his projects. Dutch clothing manufacturers, however, often demanded to be on-hand for fashion shoots, resulting in conflict situations. There desire was to have the photos shot frontally to ensure that ‘every button could be seen’. Van Bennekom, by contrast, wanted to make photos that were visually appealing, devoting more attention to the interaction of composition, pose, staging, framing, and lighting as opposed to highlighting any single detail. To achieve an expressive shadow effect, he would light his subject only on one side.

In the 1950s, there were very few professional photo models in the Netherlands. This chiefly stemmed from society’s low view of the modelling profession, an attitude that change no earlier than the 1960s. Van Bennekom therefore had only a limited number of professional photo models from which to choose. Nevertheless, with wigs and make-up he managed to transform his models into various ‘types’ of women. On occasion, Van Bennekom’s wife, Tosca, would also pose. Later in the 1960s, he used photo models from ‘Top Telefoon’, a modelling agency run by Tony and Hubert Wijnberge.

Van Bennekom worked with different types of cameras, but preferred the negative formats 6×6 and 9×12. He remained faithful to black-and-white photography, though during the second half of the 1960s, portions of his fashion reportages were shot in colour at the client’s request. Van Bennekom was very interested in the technical side of photography. He experimented primarily with formulas for photographic developers. Ready-made developing fluids were not yet available in the stores, and one therefore had to prepare these oneself. In the 1930s, Van Bennekom presented a report of his findings in the photography magazine Kleinbeeld-foto (’35mm Photo’). A decade later, his technical experience would prove to be extremely useful during a trip to Indonesia. Due to the warm and humid climate, Van Bennekom was obliged to take his own measures in order to protect his film material: he developed full rolls of film on a daily basis, subsequently immersing them in a stop bath to keep the emulsion from melting. In 1946, there were no pre-hardened film rolls as yet available on the market. In the record books that Van Bennekom kept, he recorded not only the assignment, but also the format of each negative, the film material, and the developer that was used.

In 1958 and 1959, Van Bennekom also experimented with nude photography, with a desire to photograph the naked figure in vague contours. He achieved this by immersing the photo material in special developing baths. Around 1958, Van Bennekom developed plans to publish a book on nude photography, including a treatise on his developing technique. The book never came to fruition. Van Bennekom had also previously considered publishing a photobook on his trip to Singapore and Hong Kong on assignment for Van Leer in 1946. Two spiral-bound albums with photos from this trip is all that was accomplished. Van Bennekom did manage to carry out his plans for a photobook on the subject of Amsterdam at night. Published in 1953 under the title Amsterdam bij nacht (‘Amsterdam by Night’), the book includes night shots of the Amsterdam canals, with images of streetlamp reflections on the water, illuminated facades and bridges, streets lined with rows of shiny automobiles, advertising bollards, and the city’s nightlife. In terms of theme, title, and imagery, Amsterdam bij nacht is reminiscent of Brassaï’s photobook Paris de nuit, published in 1933.

Although Lood van Bennekom worked in various areas, his merit lies especially in Dutch fashion photography. Coinciding with the emergence of the Dutch haute couture and the growth of the Dutch clothing industry, fashion photography became his specialty in the 1950s. His archive (ca. 11,400 negatives) provides an accessible overview of fashion photography of the 1950s and ’60s. It therefore serves as both an important documentation of the history of Dutch photography and the history of Dutch fashion.

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