What did the Netherlands look like fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago? To see that, we don’t need our imagination, because we can look through the lens of photographers.
In old photos we see people celebrating holidays, posing in studios, being rescued from the flood disaster, chatting on their yards, or walking with a dog cart under flying machines. We can see what photographers and their clients were interested in at the time and what apparently were not, we can read opinions about clothing and behavior, but also about colonialism, migration or gender – new questions can always be asked of historical archives. What do we see and what do we not see in a photo of chatting women in Brabant traditional costume from 1916? Of a posing family in shining white in Lisserbroek a few years earlier? From the young Indian ‘Mrs Z.-R.’ from Baarn from 1910?
This is just a tiny selection from the astonishingly rich offering of Spaarnestad Photo. Started in Haarlem, Spaarnestad grew into one of the largest photo collections in the world. It contains more than thirteen million photos and negatives, making it the largest collection of press photos in Europe. The collection includes photos by well-known Dutch photographers such as Aart Klein and Ed van der Elsken, but also by international celebrities such as Brassaï and Ansel Adams. It is clear that this collection is of great value to the Netherlands and also – because Dutch photographers also traveled around the world at that time – of cultural-historical value to the world. But after Friday, Spaarnestad will hold, like NRC reported on Thursday, to exist.
The collections are kind of threatening memory hole to disappear
At least, Spaarnestad will then experience its end as an independent foundation. This foundation prevented the entire archive from being destroyed in the 1980s, when Spaarnestad threw in the towel as a company. There is now no question of destruction: the physical collection was already housed at the National Archives, which in recent years has collected and housed various photo archives.
Although these collections continue to exist physically, they are in danger of becoming a species memory hole to disappear. The five employees of Spaarnestad have been forced to dismiss, and many thousands of hours of knowledge about the collection are being lost. Education of students and new photo specialists ends. That’s a big loss. If a photo collection is not digitized and made searchable, and if there are no archivists who can guide researchers and the public to their goals, then a collection is dead in the public sense.
Absurd silence
This situation is symptomatic of the neglect of the Dutch photographic heritage. In more organizations, the photo collections are disappearing into the background, managed by fewer and fewer people, while digitization is lagging hopelessly behind: image banks are fragmented, use different software, are provided with varying information and keywords (often by volunteers), and are difficult to find via online search systems.
The silence in which this takes place is almost absurd, in a time when the hunger for images is insatiable, and when our history is so much in the spotlight. Dutch people who are looking for images of the past, both (image) editors and researchers and the general public, are increasingly finding it easier to find foreign (often English or American) collections online. Sometimes at museum image banks such as the Smithsonian or MoMA, but more often at commercial parties, such as Getty or Corbis, which absorb and exploit cultural heritage all over the world because they are not supported by collective resources.
It is painful to have to watch that process, in a country with such a rich photographic tradition and internationally admired photographers.
The end of Spaarnestad is therefore also a distress signal about how the Netherlands deals with its visual heritage. Photo archives are essential to view and investigate who we are, and to question and adjust the stories about Dutch identity. Instead of allowing these archives to slowly decay, a national approach and investments in attention, manpower, digitization and availability are needed in the coming years. The attention that photography has received so far in the plans of the Council for Culture or the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has been meager.
A reconsideration is necessary, and the end of Spaarnestad confirms that. Otherwise, the specter of a country with its rich photographic heritage in a vegetative state looms: row after row of neatly stored, increasingly brittle, unseen photographic material, as we click through photos from the US.
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Concerns about accessibility of the National Archives photo collection: ‘This is a great cultural-historical loss’
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