Photography lends itself to storytelling, according to Eddy Posthuma de Boer (1931). And he could tell his stories anywhere: after studying at a vocational photography school, the Amsterdam-born photographer soon began working as a freelancer for numerous Dutch and international newspapers and magazines, including Het Parool, de Volkskrant, Avenue, Life, and Holland Herald.
Eddy Posthuma de Boer documented everyday life in Amsterdam, photographed the Dutch royal family and cabinet in the seventies, and visited more than eighty countries. A “social documentary photographer,” as he described himself, Posthuma de Boer portrayed children in slums and refugee camps, as well as victims of war and famine. The result ranges from moving portraits to deeply engaged photography. In the 2006 book Faces of the World, ordinary people in their everyday surroundings take center stage. Almost all are photographed head-on, in a natural setting and with a self-assured gaze, despite—or sometimes because of—the hardship of their lives.
After his travels, however, Posthuma de Boer always returned to photograph his hometown and its residents. That work culminated in books including Amsterdam, City of My Life: one hundred forty black-and-white photographs, from the fifties to the present, featuring children playing in De Pijp, people at the market, a young André Hazes singing on Albert Cuyp Market (1959), and scenes from typical Amsterdam cafés. Alongside distant journeys and life in the capital, the literary world forms a recurring theme throughout Posthuma de Boer’s career.
Together with his daughter Tessa, who is also a photographer, he created a book featuring 222 portraits of Dutch writers and poets, including his famous stylized portrait of Gerard Reve and the seemingly casual image of poet Roland Holst. Discussing his earliest portraits in that book, he says: “… when I look back at the photographs from that time, I find that the way I photograph has not fundamentally changed. I still strive for the same compositions, and even then I worked with the natural light that I now prefer to use.”
Editorial update
This Fotografie.nl article about Eddy Posthuma de Boer was originally published in 2007.
Sadly, on July 25, 2021, we learned that photographer Eddy Posthuma de Boer had died at Amsterdam UMC. “He passed away very peacefully this afternoon,” his family said. He was 90 years old.
In 2006, the year he turned 75, Kunsthal Rotterdam honored him with an exhibition, and the photographer published no fewer than three books.
His final exhibitions were on view during the first quarter of 2020 at TORCH Gallery and Fotomuseum Den Haag under the title The First Photograph of God.
