Eva Besnyö - The Choice Collection

For three years Leo Erken filmed his colleague Eva Besnyö, 54 years his senior. The film was released and broadcast in January 2003. Eva Besnyö died on the 12th of December 2003. She was one of the best-known and celebrated Dutch photographers of the twentieth century.


Poster made by the famous designer Jan Bons who is an old time friend of Eva.

In Januari 2003 Leo Erken wrote:
Eva Besnyö is a Dutch photographer of Hungarian descent and despite her advanced age she is sharp and clear in mind. She is still with us as a living legend and is everywhere cheered like a pop star. Wherever she goes people want to talk to her. She is always in the spotlight and ranks very high in the art and photography world of the Netherlands.
The film tells about her career and shows the process in which she distances herself from her life’s work. She can and will determine for herself what will remain of it for future generations. By selecting or discarding pictures she tries to define the essential part of her oeuvre. Her last savings are spent on printing from negatives in cases where there are no acceptable prints available.


Sound technician Charles Kersten, Ata Kando, Eva Besnyö and cameraman Deen van der Zaken. Final scene of the film. Photo Leo Erken

The ‘choice collection’, the 200 most beautiful of her pictures, which she made some twenty years ago, is now in question. Some experts, such as her fellow photographer and at the same time biographer Willem Diepraam, are pressing her to choose from her pre-war work and to minimize her later work. Adriaan Elligens, director of the Maria Austria Institute which is charged with the administration of Besnyö's archive, has totally different preferences and plans.
Eva Besnyö makes heavy demands on herself and the people around her. She impresses by her intelligent, sharp, firm and absolutely original attitude toward life.

Eva Besnyö in 1998, photo by Leo Erken

Eva Besnyö (1910-2003)
In 1930, 20-year-old Eva Besnyö left Budapest to develop her photographic talents in Berlin. The Jewish Hungarian immersed herself in the stormy cultural and political life of those days and took a great number of her most beautiful photos. By 1932, the worsening political climate made her leave Berlin. She moved to the Netherlands, together with her eighteen-year-old Dutch boyfriend John Fernhout.
In the 1930s, Besnyö enjoyed photographic fame in Holland and moved in the artistic circles of Fernhout’s mother, the painter Charley Toorop. During the war she was initially in hiding, but with help from the underground, she succeeded in obtaining a ‘gentile transformation’. From that moment on, she personally participated in the resistance, forging identity papers and other documents together with graphic designer Wim Brusse. They were married in 1946 and had two children, Bertus (1945) and Yara (1948).
In the 1950s, Besnyö was a much sought-after photographer. The following decade she fell into relative obscurity, but at the age of sixty she made a remarkable comeback as the photographer of the feminist movement Dolle Mina.
When she displays her favourite photos at the Rosa Spierhuis in Laren, the Netherlands, the vast majority appear to originate from her Berlin period.
'I was still free then,' she says. 'I could do what I wanted. Then came Hitler, and it was all over.'
Eva Besnyö died on 12 December 2003.

Eva Besnyö
De Keurcollectie
The Choice Collection
Die Erste Wahl

A Film by
Leo Erken

Camera
Deen van der Zaken
and Leo Erken

Sound
Charles Kersten
and Roger Cremers

Editing
Marlene van der Kooi

Music
Tjitze Vogel

Producer
Valérie Schuit
Viewpoint Productions

This production was made possible with support from the city of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Art Fund (AFK) and the Maria Austria Institute (MAI)

About the music for the documentary
Eva Besnyö -
De Keurcollectie

You can find the photographs by Eva Besnyö on the website of the
Maria Austria Institute