For Charles Breijer photography and film were first and foremost journalistic media. Rather than taking ‘nice pictures’, his chief concern was to convey information.

In the early years of the Occupation, Breijer used his press card to record facets of daily life that were not agreeable to the Occupier. That’s how he was one of the few people to take photographs when the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam was closed off. In the course of 1944, he became acquainted with Fritz Kahlenberg and became involved in De Ondergedoken Camera, a group of Amsterdam photographers who recorded the last year of the German Occupation. He took no fewer than 260 photographs, partly with a camera he had hidden in his bicycle pannier. Compared to the work of other members of De Ondergedoken Camera, Charles Breijer’s clandestine photographs are particularly interesting because they feature various facets of the armed resistance.

After 1953 Breijer concentrated chiefly on filming and hardly took any more photographs.