On 13 June, Amsterdam photographer Dolf Toussaint, one of the Netherlands’ leading photographers, died at the age of 92.
In the first half of the 1960s, Dolf Toussaint explored Amsterdam’s Jordaan district, resulting in a celebrated photo book published in 1965. Amsterdam’s residents take centre stage in Toussaint’s photographs. “This book shows you not façades, but people,” Simon Carmiggelt wrote in one of the accompanying texts. Toussaint himself explained: “You have to present it in such a way that no text is needed. You must always provide the photograph that makes a lengthy explanation unnecessary. Smell, sound, colour—you have to convey it all, time and again, on a flat plane of black, white, and grey.”
The City Archives preserves his photographs of Amsterdam. In the summer of 2018, the archive planned a retrospective exhibition of all his Amsterdam work.
Each of Toussaint’s images tells a story, and together those stories, both small and large, form a compelling portrait of Amsterdam. During the period in which he photographed the city—from around 1960 to 2000—it changed dramatically through urban renewal and shifts in its population. He felt an urgency to document those developments for the future, “before it was gone.” In an urgent letter in 1971, he called on the Arts Council to encourage photography through a commissioning policy. “There was no time to lose.” Toussaint thus helped lay the foundations for commissioned photographic work in the Netherlands. He was among the first to produce such a photo documentary.
His journalistic and parliamentary work, as well as his reports from abroad, is held by the Dutch National Archives. The Amsterdam City Archives preserves his photographs of the city. In the summer of 2010, the Amsterdam City Archives presented the exhibition The Jordaan: Photographs by Dolf Toussaint .
Exhibition of Dolf Toussaint’s Amsterdam Work
In the summer of 2018, the Amsterdam City Archives planned a retrospective exhibition of all Dolf Toussaint’s Amsterdam work. The exhibition was to be assembled from Toussaint’s recently acquired archive, containing tens of thousands of negatives and hundreds of prints of his Amsterdam work. The City Archives already held two valuable commissioned documentary projects: Amsterdam Before It Is Gone (1971–1972) and Landelijk Noord (1974). Besides offering a nostalgic look back, Toussaint’s photographs are also unique historical documents.
