Israël David Kiek, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Israël David Kiek

Dutch photographer

Date of Birth: 22-Apr-1811

Place of Birth: Groningen, Netherlands

Date of Death: 14-May-1899

Profession: photographer

Nationality: Netherlands

Zodiac Sign: Taurus

Israël David Kiek was an early portrait photographer who gave rise to the Dutch expression kiekje, 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 kiekjes, an expression which has since become a general term meaning snapshots.A pioneering element of his work was the use of close-up portrait shots, with the sitter's head filling the entire photograph.
This was unusual in early portrait photography; not until the 1920s would close-ups become a common part of the photography repertoire.