Esther Kroon

Esther Kroon (b. 1966, Naarden, the Netherlands – d. 1992, Antigua Guatemala, GT) discovered her passion for photography through taking a course with the now world-famous photographer Rineke Dijkstra, who at the time was still teaching at the Amsterdam centre for photography, De Moor. Kroon went on to become Dijkstra’s assistant for a while.

She gained recognition herself in 1989 when the Amsterdam City Archives commissioned her to photograph the children of Amsterdam. Aged 23, Kroon was the youngest photographer ever to receive this commission.

Kroon’s adventurous attitude took her to places that most people would rather avoid, and at the age of 25, during a visit to a photographer she admired in Guatemala, in the course of a street robbery near the city of Antigua, she was shot and died.

In 2019, a quarter century after her death, her impressive portraits of Amsterdam children were shown in a retrospective exhibition at the Huis Marseille photography museum in Amsterdam.