Going Native: Besnyö’s Zeelandish Girl and the Contact Zone of Dutch Photography

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of contact zone, as coined by Mary Louise Pratt, to explore the photographic representation of the supposed traditional Dutch population in the first half of the twentieth century. Startingpoint is a picture of a young girl that Eva Besnyö took in the village of Westkapelle in the southern province of Zeeland and published as part of a reportage in an illustrated magazine in 1940. The paper suggests that more attention should be devoted to the contacts between photographers and their models as part of the history of Dutch photography.