Discovering a Young Photographer, and Her Tragic Tale

Esther Kroon/Nederlands FotomuseumSelf-portrait, 1991.

One of the many discoveries to be made at last weekend’s N.Y. Art Book Fair was a new book of photographs by a Dutch photographer named Esther Kroon, who was killed in 1992.

Kroon was 25 when she was murdered by robbers in Antigua, Guatemala, while she was visiting a photographer she admired. She had been in the country for only a few days. After Kroon’s death, the publisher Willem van Zoetendaal and the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, who had been one of Kroon’s teachers and later hired her as an assistant, put out a book of Kroon’s pictures of Dutch and Spanish children. The newer book, simply titled “Esther Kroon,” includes some images from the earlier book as well as previously unpublished children’s portraits and a selection of self-portraits Kroon made with a friend in New York shortly before her death.

Van Zoetendaal points out that the low perspective from which Kroon shot many of her children’s portraits shows the influence of Dijkstra. “You can see that there’s a connection with the style of Rineke, that she has a very low point of view,” van Zoetendaal says. “Her camera is very low but even lower than Rineke’s. The children become huge, like giants.” He theorizes that one of the reasons she liked this vantage point was that it put her young subjects at ease. “The kids think it’s funny and start to play with her and spontaneous things are happening. The way she interacted with the children is very pure and honest.”

Nonetheless, Dijkstra says, “her pictures of children have a great intensity.” They are, Dijkstra adds, “far from sweet and not sentimental.”

The publication of the book coincides with a current exhibition of Kroon’s photographs at FOAM Fotomuseum in Amsterdam that runs through Oct. 14.