Israel Kiek

Israël David Kiek (April 22, 1811 – May 15, 1899) was an early portrait photographer who gave rise to the Dutch expression , meaning snapshot.

Kiek, who lived and worked in the Netherlands in the 19th century, produced cartes de visite, but was best known as a photographer of students at the University of Leiden. It was common practice among Leiden's students to have a group portrait taken by Kiek at his workshop on the Rijnsburgersingel. Groups of students would regularly appear on his doorstep in the early morning, after a long night of drinking, banging on the door to wake him and get their picture taken. The students' behaviour became so bad that Kiek eventually had a fence and raisable bridge installed to keep them out.

The student portraits were often not of the highest quality. Photographic portraits at that time required the sitters to remain still for a period of time, a task which proved difficult for the inebriated students, who therefore regularly appeared blurred in the photograph. The informal student photos, so different from the highly formal portraits of the time, came to be called , an expression which has since become a general term meaning snapshots.

Biography

Born in Groningen into a Jewish family, Kiek was the son of watchmaker David Lazarus Kiek and Lea Levie Pinto. In his younger years, he worked in a variety of different professions: as chest maker, furniture maker, lottery ticket seller, merchant and butcher. On April 4, 1838, he wed Hendrika de Leeuw, and the couple moved from Groningen to Gouda. Their first-born, Louis Israël in 1838, was followed by 10 more surviving children. In the 1840s, the couple returned to Groningen, then moved to Amsterdam in 1852 before settling in Leiden in 1855. The district of IJburg in Amsterdam has a street named after him, the Kiekstraat, and Leiden has named a path after him, the Kiekpad.

In 2015 an exhibition of his work was held at Leiden's university library under the name .

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