Everyone a Photographer

By the end of the nineteenth century, people began to record their daily lives using small, handheld cameras. This made photography more direct, faster and dynamic. The similarity with our time, in which more and more people are taking photographs, is striking. Just like today, technology gained momentum, which made the photo industry big.

In this publication, Mattie Boom describes the rise of amateur photography in the Netherlands: the photographers, the photographs, the albums, the key figures and the backgrounds. At the time, amateur photography was mainly a pastime for the wealthy: upper-class gentlemen, gentlewomen and even the young Queen Wilhelmina. Especially young entrepreneurs, however, set out to bring photography to the general public.

This book includes more than 250 photos and albums from the collections of the Rijksmuseum and other Dutch museums and archives, many of them never published before. Highlights are the only surviving Dutch Kodak album, photographs by Henry Pauw van Wieldrecht and Queen Wilhelmina, but also those by artists such as Willem Witsen and George Hendrik Breitner, and by amateur photographers who rise from obscurity in this book.