Frits J. Rotgans | Ships in Maashaven, Rotterdam (1959)
Frits J. Rotgans | Self portrait in a jet fighter (1970)
Frits J. Rotgans was known at home and abroad for the cameras he constructed in the fifties for taking wide-angle photographs of industrial reconstruction in the Netherlands. In order to test the limits of vision, he shot his pictures - bridges, pylons, cranes and the top of Rotterdam's Euromast - from a high vantage point. Devoid of artistic pretensions, he regarded himself more as a professional technician.
Rotgans started off as an amateur in the thirties. During the German occupation he More »
Frits J. Rotgans was known at home and abroad for the cameras he constructed in the fifties for taking wide-angle photographs of industrial reconstruction in the Netherlands. In order to test the limits of vision, he shot his pictures - bridges, pylons, cranes and the top of Rotterdam's Euromast - from a high vantage point. Devoid of artistic pretensions, he regarded himself more as a professional technician.
Rotgans started off as an amateur in the thirties. During the German occupation he made colour slides, the most important illegal documentation of the period in colour. He embarked on his professional career around 1950, first in Duisburg-Ruhrort as a transport officer with the Dutch Rhine Mission, a unit of the British army. Before long he was using a Reflex Korelle 6x6 reflex camera to photograph shipping traffic. On this camera he mounted a 240mm lens in order to get the right perspective for a train of boats several kilometres in length. It was the beginning of a lengthy project: a photographic inventory of shipping on the Rhine and other inland waterways. He published his first book on the subject in 1952.
Shipping, the port of Rotterdam and later Amsterdam were among his most important themes. He photographed extensively in Rotterdam's docklands, where economic growth was booming. The transformation of the port from a shipyard dominated by cranes and shipping offices into a vast area of oil refineries, petro- and bulk chemicals, was documented in the book Rotterdam, stad en haven (Rotterdam, city and port), 1959.
Additional activities in the sixties were air traffic and photo-montages, sometimes on assignment, sometimes of his own accord. Rotgans also photographed the expansion of Schiphol airport. « Less
