A Different Kind of Beauty

During the Second World War, photographer Eva Besnyö made passport photos for forged identity cards. These photos allowed people to go into hiding, travel and survive. Yet they cannot be found in any archive. Her modernist photographs of people and buildings are well known and largely digitised, but the most urgent part of her work is missing.

From 2023 I searched for these absent photographs: at the NIOD, the Dutch Resistance Museum, the Amsterdam City Archives and the Maria Austria Institute, in the collection of a young collector of identity cards, and in conversations with Besnyö’s daughter Iara Brusse. Photography cannot be more functional than a passport photo. What does it mean when a photographer’s most important contribution is both very basic and unknown? Why do we mostly value photography when it is beautiful, while functional photography disappears from view, even when it saved lives?

During the research I discovered that my own grandmother had helped forge identity cards during the war. She never spoke about it. So the project also became an inquiry into silence: within families, but also within archives and institutions.

The research started as a thesis at the master F for Fact at the Sandberg Instituut and led to the installation Reflecting Resistance (2024) and the publication Een andere schoonheid (A Different Kind of Beauty, 2026).