Henk Raaff
auteur
Henk Raaff is een Nederlandse journalist en documentairemaker. Hij is betrokken geweest bij talloze culturele projecten, met name die over de geschiedenis en visuele identiteit van Amsterdam. Hij werkte samen met Anthon Beeke aan het langlopende project 'Amsterdam. Amsterdam.', dat uiteindelijk resulteerde in een uitgebreid fotoboek.[1,2]
Henk Raaff: editing Amsterdam across documentary and photobook
An authority- and institution-grounded introduction to Henk Raaff’s urban documentary work and his image-editing role in Amsterdam. Amsterdam.
Henk Raaff: the city as subject
Amsterdam’s reference-data service identifies Henk Raaff through VIAF 42094510 and the Dutch library identifier PPN 068514654 (Adamlink Referentiedata). The Nederlands Film Festival independently describes him as a writer and film-maker whose documentaries mainly concern housing and urban development (Nederlands Film Festival).
The festival filmography makes that focus concrete. It credits Raaff as director of Amsterdam CS (1989); producer and director of Volkshuisvesting in Amsterdam (1990); director, writer and producer of Een voortreffelijk plan – de Amsterdamse westelijke tuinsteden (1995); and director, writer and producer of Schilderswijk (1997) (Nederlands Film Festival). His recurring subject is the city as a lived, built and historically layered environment.
Editing Amsterdam. Amsterdam.
That documentary background gives useful context to Amsterdam. Amsterdam. Een beeld van een stad in 150 jaar fotografie / A city in pictures over 150 years of photography. The Best Dutch Book Designs record identifies the 2022 bilingual edition’s authors as Anthon Beeke, Henk Raaff, Geert Mak, Rik Suermondt and Sacha Happée, and credits Raaff among its image editors (The Best Dutch Book Designs). The authorship is collective, and Raaff’s contribution belongs to the editorial work of making 150 years of photographs read as a city rather than as an undifferentiated archive.
The same source adds an important history of the object: Beeke designed the project more than thirty years before publication, after which it remained dormant until its 2022 realization. The jury praised the strength of the photographic selection and its driving rhythm, emphasizing how the spreads foreground the city’s inhabitants. It records a June 2022 publication date, ISBN 978-90-9034747-9, 388 pages, a print run of 3,000 and a sewn hardcover construction over greyboard. It also names Anthon Beeke and Mariola López Mariño as graphic designers and robstolk® as printer (The Best Dutch Book Designs).
These specifications are not peripheral. Historical scope, selection, typography, paper, scale and binding cooperate in the book’s account of Amsterdam. Raaff’s documentary credits help describe that account without inflating his individual role: his work across film and image editing shows sustained attention to public space, housing and long-term urban change, while the book itself remains a collaboration.
Readers should therefore follow how photographs are grouped and paced, and how the large sewn format turns archival selection into a physical sequence. The title’s “150 years” supplies a span; editing gives that span rhythm and argument.