Richard Polak

Looking at Photographs Came Before Making Them

Born into a prosperous merchant family, Polak collected photographs while traveling before he became active as a photographer himself. Research from Leiden University identifies his purchase of a folding Kodak in San Remo in 1900, where he was staying for treatment of asthma, as an early turning point in his own photographic activity. The sequence matters: he first acquired existing photographs on his travels and only then began carrying a camera himself. Photography, for Polak, was therefore a means of making pictures and also a form of visual material through which places and works of art could be brought home, compared, and organized.^*1

The group of sixty-one photographs of Egypt and Syria preserved at the Rijksmuseum is not a body of work made entirely by Polak. It is a collection of photographs he acquired while traveling. These images were exhibited in Rotterdam and Amsterdam from the 1890s onward, showing that before he became a maker, Polak was already involved in a culture of collecting, arranging, and publicly displaying photographs.^*2

A group of seventy-four photographs and photomechanical prints of Greece has the same character. Here photography functioned as proof of travel, a means of possessing views, and a way of bringing knowledge of antiquities home.^*3

An exhibition at Huis Marseille situates Polak’s collection within a broader culture in which Dutch travelers bought photographs in Egypt around the turn of the twentieth century and organized their travel experiences into albums.^*4

Making “Art Photography” in the Netherlands in the 1910s

Dutch Pictorialism sought recognition for photography as artistic expression distinct from mechanical record, making extensive use of painting-derived composition, soft tonality, and hand-worked printing. Fotomuseum Den Haag identifies seventeenth-century genre painting and the Hague School as important points of reference. In the salons of the period, photographers constructed “photography as art” through more than camera technique: the choice of printing process, exhibition venue, framing, and form of reproduction all mattered.^*5

The Rijksmuseum publication In Atmospheric Light likewise reexamines Pictorialism in Dutch photography from 1890 to 1925 through photographers’ associations, exhibitions, printing processes, and relationships to painting. Polak’s work belongs within this period when photography was being connected to the institutions and conventions of fine art.^*6

The “Golden Age” Was Already a Modern Reconstruction of the Past

The seventeenth-century paintings by Vermeer, De Hooch, Hals, and others that informed Polak’s work did not represent a neutral past for viewers around 1900. Nineteenth-century art criticism had accumulated interpretations sometimes described as “Hollandism,” which cast Dutch seventeenth-century painting as civic, Protestant, realist, and rooted in everyday life. Later scholarship has shown that this image of the “Golden Age” was itself a cultural framework formed in the nineteenth century.^*21

Treating Old Dutch as a direct reconstruction of seventeenth-century life obscures the cultural conditions of the 1910s in which it was made. Around 1900, industrialization and urbanization were advancing in the Netherlands while art and design were also witnessing renewed interest in authenticity, traditional techniques, and historical forms.^*22 This does not establish Polak’s personal beliefs, but it does show that at the moment when he assembled old paintings, antiques, and costumes to build an “Old Dutch” room, tradition itself was being selectively reformulated within modern society. The past pictured in Old Dutch should therefore be read as a past reconstructed through early twentieth-century art history, collecting, and display, not as life preserved unchanged from the seventeenth century.

Leaving Business for Health Reasons and Building a Room for Photography

In 1911, Polak withdrew from business for health reasons and began devoting substantially more time to photography. In 1913, he found an old room on the Houttuin in Rotterdam with north-facing light, acquired antique furnishings, and remade it as a seventeenth-century interior.^*7

What matters is that Polak did not create the atmosphere of an old master painting through softening on the photographic print alone. Furniture, costume, the placement of figures, and light from the window were all composed in front of the camera; the reality to be photographed was shaped in advance. Christie’s description of the series likewise confirms that he reconstructed his Rotterdam studio as a seventeenth-century room for these photographs.^*8

Portrait Finishing Learned from Karl Schenker

In September 1913, Polak spent about six weeks studying with the Berlin portrait photographer Karl Schenker, absorbing practical methods of negative retouching and studio portraiture. His work therefore emerged from more than an interest in Dutch painting; it also involved direct exposure to international studio technique and salon culture. This brief training with Schenker coincided with Polak’s movement from amateur period-costume pictures toward professional studio methods. The sources support the conclusion that experience treating lighting, figure placement, and negative retouching as a coordinated process contributed to the precision of his later staged photographs.^*9

His recorded processes included bromide, bromoil, and platinum printing. These printing methods offered different control over tonality and surface texture, connecting the act of photographing the set to the final appearance of the image as a pictorial object.^*10

Early works including The Letter were accepted for a British photographic exhibition in 1913, after which Polak strengthened his connection to the London Salon. The “Old Holland” created in his studio was thus translated from a private interest in Rotterdam into the shared visual language of international Pictorialist salons.^*11

British Staged Photography and Polak’s Unusual Position in the Netherlands

Polak’s reception in Britain was not accidental. PhotoLexicon notes that Britain had a tradition, extending back to Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, of assembling figures and scenes so that a narrative was constructed before the photograph was made. In that setting, Old Dutch was more readily received than it was in the Netherlands.^*24

At roughly the same time, F. Holland Day staged the Passion of Christ, Guido Rey restaged classical paintings, and J. C. Strauss made portraits in the manner of Frans Hals. Polak’s distinction lies less in photographing historical scenes as such than in the weight he placed on constructing the subject, costume, interior, and light in advance, at a moment when many Dutch art photographers pursued painterly effects primarily through specialized printing processes.^*24

The former Royal Photographic Society holdings now preserved by the V&A include both a separate box of Polak prints and a portfolio of Photographs from Life in Old Dutch Costume. The survival of individual works circulated through international salons alongside a later, systematically organized series shows that his practice cannot be reduced to isolated pictures made in an old-master style.^*25

Repeated Roles and Interiors Across the Series

In the Old Dutch photographs of 1913–15, Polak changed the roles of figures and the incidents depicted while maintaining the same room and historical atmosphere. Subjects such as an artist and model, a figure reading a letter, and scenes of domestic life recall paintings by Vermeer, De Hooch, and Hals, but the emphasis falls less on exact reconstruction than on producing a sequence of photographs that looked convincingly historical.^*12

Research at Leiden University states that of roughly seventy-five to eighty seventeenth-century-style photographs, sixty-five were included in the self-published 1923 portfolio Photographs from Life in Old Dutch Costume. It was published by Hanfstaengl, known for art reproductions, with an introduction by F. J. Mortimer. In this form, the photographs were read less as individual salon pictures competing on their own than as a sequence built from recurring interiors, costumes, and light. Staging at the moment of exposure and ordering at the moment of publication worked together to present past life as a coherent visual world within a single volume.^*13

In the surviving portfolio recorded by Christie’s, all sixty-five images are photogravures mounted on heavy card. Polak did not leave the photographs solely as unique salon prints; he assembled them into a unified reproducible object that art collectors could own.^*14

Circulation Through Salons, Photography Magazines, and Camera Clubs

In 1915, Polak held a solo exhibition at The Amateur Photographer’s Little Gallery in London and donated the proceeds from sales to the British Red Cross. The conjunction of wartime charity and salon exhibition reveals one of the social routes through which the work circulated.^*15

Solo exhibitions are also recorded in 1924 at the Camera Club of New York and the galleries of the Royal Photographic Society. His reputation depended on networks of camera clubs, annual salons, and specialist magazines that predated the systematic collecting of photography by museums.^*16

Dutch Pictorialism and the Limits of “Pioneer” Claims

Polak moved to Switzerland in 1915–16 for health reasons, and the Old Dutch studio in Rotterdam was dismantled. He continued to make travel photographs and participate in exhibitions, but his reputation remained centered on the seventeenth-century-style works produced within a brief period.^*17

Leiden University research also identifies specific iconographic misreadings and historical inconsistencies in Polak’s staged scenes. The current critical question is therefore not how accurately he reconstructed seventeenth-century life, but how an early twentieth-century photographer produced an image of a recognizably “Dutch” past. Those inconsistencies are useful evidence rather than simply failures: they help show what contemporary viewers were prepared to accept as seventeenth-century Dutch. The critical interest of the series lies in its reconstruction of the past through painting, antiques, costume, and photographic technique, not in antiquarian accuracy.^*18

Fotomuseum Den Haag’s Photography Becomes Art does not present Polak as an isolated hero. It places him within the longer process by which photography was institutionalized as art in the Netherlands and then gave way to new photographic approaches. This framing makes it possible to assess his importance without assigning disproportionate influence to a very short period of production.^*19

The Rijksmuseum’s preservation of Polak’s travel collections as photographic-historical material also prevents him from being reduced to someone who merely “made pictures.” His collecting and exhibiting of photographs, the submission of his own work to international salons, and the editing of reproducible portfolios together reveal an early twentieth-century photographic culture that crossed art, travel, collecting, and publishing. Seen as one biography, the collecting that preceded his production and the exhibitions and publishing that followed it condense a period in which photographs moved continually among three roles: things to make, things to collect, and things to reproduce and circulate.^*20

How the Appearance of the Past Was Made

The chronological inconsistencies in costume and iconography identified by Leiden University weaken the series as straightforward historical evidence, but they also open another question that matters to photographic history. Later scholarship has examined the memory of the “Golden Age” itself as a cultural construction. In that light, Polak’s photographs preserve less the seventeenth century itself than the order, interiors, and gestures that the early twentieth century expected the seventeenth century to contain, fixed with photography’s sense of material presence.^*23 This is where the work acquires a critical position beyond the simple observation that it resembles old master painting.

The Charge of Being “Unphotographic” Was Later Reframed

As New Objectivity and New Photography emphasized lens sharpness, mechanical vision, and modern subjects as values specific to photography, Polak’s period costumes and staging became easy to dismiss as painterly imitation unnecessary to the medium. PhotoLexicon records that the postwar historian Helmut Gernsheim sharply rejected such work as a lapse in taste.^*26

Once staged photography and image manipulation became established artistic methods, however, the same artificiality raised a different set of questions. There is no basis for calling Polak a direct progenitor of contemporary staged photography, but his work can be reassessed as an early instance in which photography’s capacity to appear to record reality was shown to depend on design carried out before the shutter was released.^*26