He also made a large number of books about cities and countries in Europe and mounted exhibitions of the images, the most famous being Women of Paris (1954), and contributed to a mass observation project of Nazi-occupied Utrecht.
[6] Jesse received his medical internship in 1937 and the same year married his high school sweetheart Ro Dommering and they take up residence in open-plan flexible housing built by Gerrit Rietveld on Erasmuslaan 3 in Utrecht.
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands Jesse was commissioned by Utrecht municipality archivist JWC van Campen to carry out a visual documentation of life in that city.
[10] The destruction of Rotterdam in May 1940, and the strategic importance of Utrecht as a railway junction and industrial zone provided the impetus, and Jesse carried out the photography in the winter and summer of 1942, incidentally capturing the imposed anti-Semitism.
[14] Given the success of Women of Paris and due to his increasing work as a photographer for the Paviljoen voor de Volksgezond (Pavilion of Public Health) at the 1955 Nationale Energie Manifestatie E ’55 (Exposition) in Rotterdam, Jesse abandoned his general practice to concentrate on photography.
Edward Steichen invites Nico Jesse, along with fellow Netherlandaise photographers Emmy Andriesse, Eva Besnyö, Ed van der Elsken, Henk Jonker, Cas Oorthuys and Hans Schreiner, to participate in the 1955 exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
[15][16] The following year he meets German journalist Christine (Ute) Vallance (born Fischinger) (1922-2004) and she acts as his guide on a trip to Berlin, where he photographs for publisher Van Loghum Slaterus.
In financial straits, he sells his photography equipment and stores his archive in an empty factory in Cuijk and takes up medically related work in Oss and then in insurance for GAK in Venlo.
[18] Amongst his papers was discovered the introduction to an unspecified Jesse exhibition written by Paul Citroen in which he describes the photographer's work as taking the camera "by the short hairs" to show it life.