Figueres, 26 October 2015
The Dalí Foundation incorporated 11 unpublished negatives of the Dutch photojournalist Jan Adam Stevens (1911-1965). The pictures, result of a visit by Stevens to Salvador Dalí in Portlligat back in 1960, have been acquired to his son and heir Frank Stevens van Hemert. These negatives were part of Stevens' private collection together with some personal photographs he kept in two cases in his home of Haarlem (The Netherlands).
The Dalí Foundation will manage the rights of this material, as it does with the rights of other Catalan photographers such as Oriol Maspons, Francesc Català-Roca or Xavier Miserachs. The Archives of the Centre for Dalinian Studies at the Dalí Foundation has more than 12,000 images including all of Dalí's life periods, of authors like Man Ray, Brassaï, Cecil Beaton, Eric Schaal, George Platt Lynes, Horst P. Horst or Philippe Halsman, just to mention some.
Stevens' photographs, all of which are unpublished, complements the collection of snapshots of the 1960's, a period of great creativity with regard to the project of the future Dalí Theatre-Museum, and coincides with the homage paid to Dalí by Figueres, his birth town, on 12 August 1961.
Biography of Jan Adam Stevens
He was born in 1911 in Haarlem, near Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and died in 1965. He worked as a photojournalist in military campaigns in Indonesia and also for the Royal Dutch Family. After the Second World War, in 1946 and 1947, he joined the Dutch navy as a professional. As Communication Officer, he did photographic reports in Java and Bali, in Indonesia. In the late 1940's, he founded the news agency NFP (Nationaal Photo Persbureau) in Amsterdam, one of the most important agencies in The Netherlands. In January 1953, due to the hurricane that broke the sea walls and caused thousands of deaths, he was the first to fly over the devastated area and their pictures were seen around the world. In 1958, he and his family were among the first Dutch tourists who spent their summer in Catalonia, particularly in Stiges. The Spaarnestad Photo National Archive in The Hague keeps 250,000 negatives from his studio, 4,000 aerial photos and 18,000 photographic plates.
