Jan Kamman | Portrait of the photographer Jan Kamman (1925-1927)
Between the two world wars Jan Kamman featured prominently in a host of publications concerned with innovation in photography. During this period he was an important architectural and commercial photographer and experimented with double printing and photograms. Today his work is relatively unknown, because virtually his entire prewar production was destroyed when Rotterdam was bombed in 1940.
Jan Kamman's father was the lithographer and later photographer H.M.J. Kamman. Although Kamman junior More »
Between the two world wars Jan Kamman featured prominently in a host of publications concerned with innovation in photography. During this period he was an important architectural and commercial photographer and experimented with double printing and photograms. Today his work is relatively unknown, because virtually his entire prewar production was destroyed when Rotterdam was bombed in 1940.
Jan Kamman's father was the lithographer and later photographer H.M.J. Kamman. Although Kamman junior had studied painting, he set up in Schiedam as a professional photographer in 1925. Most of his assignments came from architects connected with the architectural journal De 8 en Opbouw and the office of Brinkman and Van der Vlugt (later Van den Broek and Bakema), who built the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam between 1926 and 1930.
Kamman's experiments with new techniques and materials were in line with the ideas of these protagonists of Dutch Functionalism. Between 1926 and 1928 he collaborated with Paul Schuitema. In 1927 he became the first Dutchman to publish an article about the photogram in Focus, followed in 1929 by one about modern photography in Lux-De Camera. In this second article he put forward a convincing case for New Photography, of which he, Gerrit Kiljan, Paul Schuitema and Piet Zwart were the most important Dutch pioneers. In 1929 they represented the Netherlands at the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart.
Many of Kamman's assignments in the 1930s came from interior designer Willem Gispen, and also from several companies: Stokvis/Erres (electrical appliances), Berkel's Patent, Kwaaital (contractors), C.Chevalier (printers), Philips, Blue Band and the contractors Boele & Van Eesteren.
In 1930 Jan Kamman took a teaching position at the Rotterdam Academy of Art and Technology, where he gave a course in photography and its commercial application. After his archive was destroyed in the blitz of May 14 1940, he gradually gave up photography. Although he continued to teach until 1963, his chief pursuits after the war were drawing and painting. « Less
