Nico Jesse

Life & Legacy

Nico Jesse (22 August 1911 – 21 January 1976) was a Dutch humanist photographer and photojournalist, later, he became a commercial and advertising photographer. Originally a physician, he combined his work as a doctor with his passion for photography until, in 1955, he gave up his medical practice to devote himself exclusively to photography, producing imagery for several companies’ annual reports and business documents. He also made a large number of books about cities and countries in Europe and mounted exhibitions of the images, the most famous being Women of Paris (1954), and contributed to a mass observation project of Nazi-occupied Utrecht. In 1962 Nico Jesse took up his original profession again and at his death in 1976, left a large photographic oeuvre, in which people and their everyday activities are the focus.