P.R.A. van Iddekinge — door de lens van De Booys

Utrecht: Uitgeverij Matrijs. Second edition, first printing. 160 pp.. Condition: Fine (F). Good copy. Black-and-white photographs document Arnhem from the final year of the Second World War through the city’s early postwar recovery. In autumn 1944, photographer P.J. de Booys remained in the evacuated city under cover of work as a water-service technician. At considerable personal risk, he photographed departing residents and German units removing factory equipment, commercial stocks and household contents after the Battle of Arnhem. De Booys later recorded the liberation from nearby Velp, then followed Arnhem as daily life resumed and damaged neighbourhoods were rebuilt. The resulting documentary sequence brings together wartime plunder, liberation, reconstruction and ordinary urban life between 1944 and 1954. The publication grew out of the Arnhem Municipal Archive exhibition “De Booys, een bijzondere fotograaf,” organised around the photographer’s hundredth birthday, and presents his work as a sustained local record rather than a general history of the battle.