Kryn Taconis

Cagliari. Photograph by Kryn Taconis, 1956

In the early 1940s, after a brief period as a cameraman, Kryn Taconis (Rotterdam 1918 — Toronto 1979) began to study photography, first as a student of Paul Guermonprez and then as a darkroom technician in Amsterdam.
During the Second World War he worked as a freelance reporter and secretly photographed the German occupation of the Netherlands. It also became part of the “Underground Camera” movement, which had identified photography as a form of resistance.
In 1946 he left for the United States, where he had his first contacts with the magazine "Life “, of which two years later he would be the Benelux correspondent.
At the end of the 1940s he settled in Paris and began to collaborate with Magnum Photos, becoming a member in 1954. Two years later, sent by the Parisian agency to Sardinia, he took about forty shots between the port and the markets of Cagliari, the Sant'Efisio procession to Pula, the streets of Orgosolo and some towns in the Sassari area.
In 1957, in Algeria, he secretly documents the activity of the National Liberation Front (the Algerian revolutionary army) against French colonialists. This important report, immediately censored by Magnum who did not want to have conflicts with the French government, will be published posthumously only at the end of the Seventies.
After a short stay in Brussels, in 1959 he moved permanently to Canada, where, after the partnership with Magnum ended the following year, he continued his freelance activity.
During the sixties he made some documentaries on behalf of the Canadian government and in the following decade he taught photography in Kitchener, Ontario. In 1989, the National Archives of Canada dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him entitled "Photojournalist “.