1923 - 2015

Dolf Kruger  - originally Krüger - was born in 1923 in Chexbres (Switzerland). After secondary education at a Dutch HBS he went to nautical college. After the war he studied Indology for a short period. As a photographer, Kruger was self-taught.

At the age of 23 he accompanied Ad Windig when he made a photo report on the parliamentary elections of 1946. In the same year he gained experience working with Maria Austria and Aart Klein of the Particam  photographer's collective. After an apprenticeship with Carel Blazer in 1947 he finally started working as an independent photographer.

From 1948 until 1951 he worked for De Tijd, then got a permanent job at the newspaper De Waarheid where he stayed for the next ten years. Here he succeeded photographer Freek Aal and was himself succeeded in 1955 by Kors van Bennekom. His archive from this period includes numerous photo reports on CPN (Dutch Communist Party) manifestations, as well as pictures of workers, strikes, house evictions and poverty. Kruger mainly documented the downside of the post-war reconstruction of the Netherlands, and in this respect his work is a counterpart to that of Cas Oorthuys.

In 1960 Dolf Kruger established himself as an independent photographer, concentrating on corporate and industrial photography.

In 2013 Kruger becomes a pensioner and emigrates to Sweden. He dies there in 2015.