Leendert Blok

Leendert Blok (1895-1986) gets very early on into photography introduced to the medium by his maternal uncle who was an amateur. He spends his childhood summers at his uncle’s home in Dombourg, where lives a community of artists. Following photojournalism studies in Pretoria, South Africa, Blok opens in Lisse, his hometown, a studio named Foto Technischbureau.

He becomes passionate about the emergence of new techniques in photography and experiments with the panoramic format. His main clients are horticulturists of the areas near Haarlem and Sassenheim. He quickly specializes in the production of their display catalogues and develops his own methods of colour photography. He begins with the practice of the autochrome, from 1925 until 1930, which enables him to reproduce an image in colour. The resulting image is unique, not duplicable. Following this process, Lendeert Blok used the technique of Spectracolor.

The Leendert Blok archives are held at the Spaarnestad Photo, in The Hague, in the Netherlands ; they have been rediscovered by Frido Troost (1960-2013).