[7] Inspired by his passion, his father bought him a Kodak Brownie and built a darkroom where Schalkwijk spent many hours.

After that, he embarked on an oil tanker bound for New Orleans to learn how to build pipes for transporting liquids and shipped his Volkswagen Beetle for New York.

In August 1957, upon arrival in the United States, Schalkwijk took an airplane to New York, picked up his car and started a road trip to fulfill his boyhood dream inspired by reading National Geographic.

An article in the March 1958 issue of Esquire prompted Schalkwijk to visit Ajijic, after which he continued the journey to Mexico-City to study Spanish.

[13] He also photographed work by other young artists from the Taccogna group, such as Roger von Gunten and the Honduran sculptor Enrique Miralda.

In the early years of his career, Schalkwijk could not make ends meet with his travel photography or by selling photographs of children to their parents.

One was to take pictures of a fertilizer factory in Monclova, Coahuila, and for this he bought a Plaubel Peco Supra II camera for 4 x 5” film, with which he made his first aerial shots.

[3] It is common to find Schalkwijk's photographs in Mexican art publications, especially of the work of authors such as Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera.

In 2019, the National Institute of Anthropology and History awarded him a medal of honor for the archive of his work on the Sierra Tarahumara and its inhabitants.

In less than a year, Schalkwijk took about 8,000 photos, almost all in black and white, of the city's most famous places and most iconic buildings.

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has a small collection of Schalkwijk's photographs of Centro Urbano Benito Juárez after the 1985 earthquake.

[15] In 1975, together with the linguist Don Burgess, Schalkwijk published his first book with photos of his travels to the Sierra Tarahumara.

In collaboration with his son Adriaan and photography historian Gina Rodríguez, Schalkwijk has been leading a team dedicated to the preparation of exhibitions of photos from his archive.

In 2006 he presented his first major exhibition called Paisajes de Agua (Waterscapes), with large format photos from different parts of the world.

The exhibition was presented at the Vasconcelos Library and at the Museo Nacional de Culturas del Mundo in Mexico City.