Like Golden Age paintings in 17th century Holland, photography – democratic, accessible, fast, innovative – created American identity. The Rijksmuseum’s generous, far-ranging exhibition expresses that open spirit.
Financial Times
American Photography will give picture of the country through the eyes of American photographers, showing the country in all its complexity. The exhibition takes themes such as the American dream, landscapes and portraiture to trace how photographers increasingly reflected on changes and events in their country. A major topic of the show is photography’s evolution as an art form, from 19th-century daguerreotypes of frost flowers on a window to the work of Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, Dawoud Bey and Sarah Sense. Another important theme is how photography has grown to be a part of everyday life, which is demonstrated by family portraits, advertisements, postcards, gramophone record covers and more.
The photography collection of the Rijksmuseum comprises a representational overview of the history of photography in almost 200,000 vintage prints, photo albums, photo books and other exceptional photographic works. It includes acknowledged masterpieces by leading photographers such as Anna Atkins, Gustave Le Gray, Brassaï, Helen Levitt and Ed van der Elsken, as well as examples of the application of photography in advertising, fashion, journalism and science.
Rijksmuseum’s photography curators are Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, who have been stewarding the photography collection since the 1990s. Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom received the AIPAD award in 2023. They are the first non-US winners of this prestigious American prize. In recent years they have been focusing primarily on collecting photography from America, which has been one of the most important countries in this field since the 1950s.
