George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) was a famous Dutch painter and photographer. He used photographs to capture the fleeting conditions of street life and atmospheric effects – rainy weather in particular – as reference materials for his paintings. Breitner was one of the first photographers to use hand-held cameras, which had just been introduced. He experimented with perspectives and photographed into the light, capturing scenes of urban vitality using deliberately blurred images.
He used a Kodak Nr. 1 Box camera with 100 exposures preloaded. Occasionally, he captured the same subject from different perspectives or under different weather conditions. At other times, he used photography to reference an atmosphere, a light effect, or the weather in the city at a specific moment. In the last decades of his life, Breitner visited Paris, London, and Berlin, among other places, and continued to take photographs.
Below are some stunning historical photos of Amsterdam from the 1890s by George Hendrik Breitner.
Awesome stuff. What stands out to me is that it is so clean! Did they simply consume much fewer products? For example, always carry food from the market in the same bag home, therefore never needing packaging?
Single use plastics weren’t really a thing then so I’d say yes, people were probably using reusable bags.
The smell might not have been particularly appealing.
I remember the 80’s and it is astonishing to me that people my age looked back at these days the same amount of time back as I do now.
Has the world changed more or less from 1935-1980 then 1980-2025. When you see the images, you think it’s another world, but maybe it’s that much different then we expect. Although WWII has fundamentally changed the world.
Amsterdam sewage system is one of the first on large cities and by the time of some of these pictures still not fully built, so the smell must’ve been… pungent.
Together with the noise it would be a sensorial experience you might not enjoy, even if no plastics, plenty of other debris, animal faeces and the like.