Eva Besnyö's 1947 Dutch children's stamps reveal postwar hope

In 1947, the Dutch PTT issued children's charity stamps featuring photographs by Eva Besnyö, a Hungarian-Dutch photographer associated with the New Photography movement. Unlike typical cheerful illustrations, Besnyö's portraits showed real children—including her partner's niece Arine Brusse—with candid, uncertain expressions. The images, taken in 1944 during wartime, reflect a fragile postwar optimism and a shift in Besnyö's work from detached architectural photography to intimate human portraiture. Besnyö, a Jewish refugee who fled Berlin in 1932, survived the war with a forged identity document created with help from anthropologist Arie de Froe, sculptor Joseph Csaki, and resistance fighter Willem Arondéus. After the war, she abandoned architecture photography and later documented the Dolle Mina feminist movement in the 1970s. The stamps were the only ones designed by a woman until 1963. A major retrospective, 'Eva Besnyö – De bevrijde camera', will open at Fotomuseum Den Haag from September 5, 2026, to January 31, 2027, featuring a huif (covered wagon) from artist Mirthe Berentsen's project 'Beyond the Nuclear Family', which retraced a 1975 Dolle Mina caravan tour for abortion rights.