Artist: Henk Jonker (1912-2002)

Scheveningen, ouders met kinderwagen op de Pier (1961)

Fine art pigment print, produced with a new made scan from the original negative, size 41x40cm.

Henk Jonker (1912-2002) was born in Berkhout, a small village near Hoorn. His family moved when he was 13 years old to Amsterdam. During the war he worked at the Amsterdam population register and became involved in the resistance. He met the photographer Marie Oestreicher (better known as Maria Austria), from whom he learned the photographic techniques of falsifying identity cards. He gratefully used this for the resistance, until he had to go into hiding in 1944.
After the war, Henk Jonker concentrated entirely on photography. He marries Maria Austria and, with her and a few others, establishes a news agency under the name Particam (“Partisan Camera”). His work in the context of reconstruction has garnered recognition and appreciation. Also photos of the flood of 1953 are known. He was one of the first on the spot and made his famous photographs of people on the roofs of their houses. Henk Jonker separates from Maria Austria, met in 1963 Manja van Rootselaar with whom he later married and got with her in 1964 his only child, a daughter, Manja. From 1965 to 1968 he settled as a patissier in Spain. After his return to the Netherlands he was attached to photo studio Harry Pot in Bentveld. The municipal archive in Amsterdam obtained a part of his oeuvre in 1981, from which later a black and white edition was created with the title ‘Holland Zonder Haast’.
Characteristic of his work was working in black-and-white, the technical refinement, capturing the small moments (people, street scenes) and the many meanings that can be discovered in a photograph and that only after looking carefully and attentively at the viewer reveal. Since 1986, Henk Jonker has focused on art painting.