1023
subjects at a private technical school. At the age of 16 he
joined the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Bouwkunst
(Society for the Advancement of Architecture) and in
1855, he and a small group of kindred spirits founded the
society Architectura et Amicitia, a debating club where
the international magazine portfolio brought news of
developments in the arts, the natural sciences and tech-
nology. It was in these circles that Olie received further
theoretical training and his wider cultural interests were
shaped. He translated sections of E.E. Viollet-le-Duc’s
Entretiens sur l’architecture and lectured on Grammaire
des arts du dessin by Charles Blanc, former director
of the Paris École des Beaux Arts. During the years he
also participated succesfully in many competitions for
artistic architectural designs.
The fi rst time the word ‘photography’ was mentioned
at one of the society’s meetings was by Olie in 1857.
He cited a report from a Dutch periodical about the
Architectural Photographic Society that had been set
up in London with the aim to provide its members with
reasonably priced photographic illustrations of ‘note-
worthy’ buildings from all countries. The matter came
up once again, but Olie received little response among
his fellow members for his proposal to collaborate with
the English and exchange photographs for measured
drawings.
For architects the photograph and the drawing were
not comparable media. For someone like Viollet-le-
Duc, drawing was a higher form of seeing, despite the
importance he attached to photography as an aid in
restoration. However, at the weekly art reviews more and
more photographs were shown. In 1859 Olie brought
along a series of stereoscopic views of Amsterdam by
Pieter Oosterhuis. Shortly thereafter, he began himself
experimenting with the art of photography.
Olie probably took his fi rst photographs in the sum-
mer of 1861, only a few months after he had started
his career as a teacher of architectural drawing at the
technical school. At that time there were enough publica-
tions available with technical instructions for would-be
photographers. In his notebooks Olie copied recipes
for collodion, which he had taken from E. Robiquet
(Manuel théorique et pratique de photographie sur
collodion et sur albumine, 1859) and A.A.E. Disdéri
(L’Art et la Photographie, 1862), among others. Olie
built his own camera, a simple model, similar to the
earliest daguerreotype cameras, which could take glass
plates of 10.5 × 12.8 cm which he cut himself from
window glass.
That fi rst summer Olie explored the utterly familiar
world of the busy dockland and industrial area where
he was born and where he still lived among his ex-
tended family of craftsmen, ship-builders and timber
merchants. Here he took scenes not normally recorded
by commercial photographers: a ship under construc-
tion, a mast-makers yard, or views taken from the deck
of a ship.
In 1862 Olie equipped his camera with a new lens
of sharper defi nition and took up portraiture, a genre
which he had never attempted as a draughtsmen. He
made more than 150 portraits of his family, friends and
acquaintances, sometimes capturing them in their own
environment, and on other occasions against an artifi cial
backdrop of cloths, rugs and props, like those used in the
professional portrait studio. Sometimes Olie moved his
darkroom equipment to friends and relatives who lived
in the city centre and photographed from their attic win-
dows. In some cases the views he made from these high
vantage points can be fi tted together to breath-taking
panoramas. They provide a unique and highly personal
portrait of Amsterdam’s city centre. Unlike his drawings,
Olie never submitted his photographs to exhibitions,
but in 1864 and 1865 he presented his albumen and
salted-paper prints to his colleagues at an Architectura
et Amicitia meeting. Soon after, he abandoned his pho-
tographic experiments for many years.
Olie would only return to photography after his re-
tirement as headmaster of the technical school in 1890.
By then, he was a 56-year-old widower with four young
children ranging from four to eleven years of age. He
still used the same camera but fi tted with a new lens. Olie
built a number of ingenious cassettes which he could
load at home with ready-made dry-gelatin plates of 9x12
and 13 × 18 cm. In the intervening years, his interest in
photography had not waned. Olie gave slide shows for
his pupils and others audiences with the magic lantern.
The teacher in him recognized the educational potential
of the picture machine and it may well have inspired him
to produce his photographs specially for it.
Between 1890 and 1904 Olie took over 3600 photo-
graphs, most of them portraying the city of Amsterdam,
including street scenes and residents and workers in
their own surroundings. Amsterdam was in the process
of rapid transformation and Olie recorded construction
works at different stages of completion, moving about
the building sites freely as he knew the architect, the
client or the building contractor. Often his views are not
topographical in the strictest sense, but the city serves
as a backdrop for public events—military parades and
balloon lift-offs, visits by dignitaries and ship launch-
ings. He continued to display a predilection for high
viewpoints in this period, even when it was no longer
strictly necessary.
What fascinated Olie was the new architecture within
its urban context. Unlike some artists of his day, he was
not charmed by decay. Although the painter-photog-
rapher G.H. Breitner and Olie were both admirers of
Amsterdam’s beauty, they produced quite distinct bodies
of work. While Breitner reinforced the shabbiness of the
old districts and evoked the dank atmosphere of decay,