De Spaarnestad always needed more pictures than its own photographers could supply. That was the reason why the company also bought material from photo press agencies and freelance photographers, for instance from Walter Blum (1890-1964).

In the 1930s, after Hitler came into power, Walter Blum fled from Germany to the Netherlands, where he had to go into hiding during World War II. After the liberation in 1945, he established himself as a studio photographer in Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, he was one of the first photographers to specialize in fashion photography. He sold his pictures to a great number of fashion and women’s magazines in and outside the country. Among other things, his agency devised a new type of pattern for sew-it-yourself fashion and he made photographic illustrations to go with these patterns.

In the Netherlands, he sold his pictures to women’s magazines like Libelle. He took the photographs in his studio using often simply painted backgrounds, but these featured an ideal world full of joy and happiness, exactly fitting into the image the women’s magazines wished to convey at the time. After Blum’s death, his surviving work was included in the Spaarnestad Photo collections.

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