The Dutch Survey of American Photography is the first in Europe. It traces America’s self-documented history with cool detachment, bearing witness to an adolescent country and art forms developing side-by-side.
The extent to which American imagery permeates our daily lives means that, even though I have never visited the country, I can still conjure a clear picture of it in my mind’s eye. The States’ visual hegemony, ingrained as some cross-cultural visual default, has been guaranteed by its 185-year love affair with the photographic image. Although their (colonial) painting tradition was late to start in comparison to Europe, Americans started snapping themselves a mere four months after the photographic process was invented by Louis Daguerre in France in 1839, and they have since pursued the discipline with a natural aptitude.
The new exhibition American Photography at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum fittingly captures this history in sweeping panoramas and minute details. The Dutch survey traces America’s self-documented history with cool detachment, bearing witness to an adolescent country and art form developing side-by-side.
Rather extraordinarily, the Rijksmuseum has amassed a photographic collection of over 200,000 items, of which American photography accounts for over 7,500 individual photographs and a further 1,500 albums. The current exhibition only reveals the tip of the iceberg, with approximately 200 individual images on display. Drawing from such a collection, a survey of this breadth – the first ever in Europe – could have resulted in a boggling number of configurations. Yet Rijksmuseum Director Taco Dibbets is keen to stress the guiding criteria behind the show: “The visual quality of the photograph is always the prime consideration.”
This qualitative approach makes American Photography all the more fascinating, as its curators have been unafraid to get technical. Curator Mattie Boom explains, “Daguerre’s invention spread tremendously quickly. All those with scientific backgrounds started experimenting with it, but of course, these first inventors were not artists. They were wealthy people interested in technology, physics, and chemistry, and that’s how these early images came about.”
Boom tells me this as we stand in front of one of the earliest extant examples of an American photograph: Henry Fitz Jr.’s Self-portrait, a daguerreotype from January 1840 on loan from the Smithsonian. Fitz, a telescopic engineer, was the inventor Boom refers to. His expertise in polished mirrors and lenses reduced the exposure time of early cameras enough to accurately capture the likeness of animated objects – such as himself – for the first time.
The inventor places himself in the picture frame as a testament to this giant leap forward. Yet, with his eyes gently closed, Self-portrait is a strangely sensitive image, as if Fitz was prescient of the momentousness of the occasion. His visage, captured with unquestionable accuracy via his mirrored lens, floats like an apparition upon a blue-black background shot through with constellations of over-exposure. Its spacey effect reminded me of Earthrise, 1968, with the image in its tiny proportions representing a similar milestone in human history.
Boom’s classification of Fitz as an inventor confirms a central tenet of the exhibition, that for most of history, photography has not been an artistic pursuit but a practical interest; the nebulous definitions of photography and art certainly connect but are not implicitly aligned. Once fully developed and portable, the camera soon entered homes and workplaces and. In contrast, early images were the haphazard results of experimentation, and the potency of photography quickly became caught in its function either to preserve or to promote.
These twin motivations underpin the multiple, subjective categories into which the show is divided: ‘At Home’, full of intimate memorabilia and nostalgic images; ‘The American Dream’, in which visions of prosperity are sold through idealised advertisements; ‘Seeing is Believing’, questioning the reality and truth of photographed images; ‘Landscapes’, inspiring adventure and exploration; and ‘Death and Disaster’, indeed the most poignant of the lot, in which photography is used as a warning, a condemnation and a witness to the trauma of the past. War crimes and racial abuses populate this room, indelible stains on America’s past and present.
In all the above, very few included ‘artists’ are motivated by more than the prosaic reason to document their lived experience. Often, aesthetic qualities are simply a byproduct of the format or inherent to the subject matter itself. With this in mind, and with the sense of detachment mentioned earlier, Boom and her co-curator Hans Rooseboom chose a disarmingly simple criterion upon which to include works in American Photography; any American with a camera could have qualified, blowing the canon wide open.
Rooseboom explains this decision to expand the pool of photographers beyond what might have been expected: “When Mattie and I started to think of this exhibition seven years ago, we could, of course, have simply followed a list of famous photographers. But we decided to do it differently and allowed ourselves to be surprised at things. There are still famous photographers in the show, from Diane Arbus to Nan Goldin and William Klein to Andy Warhol, but we tried to find as many unknown items that we could that, despite not being very well known, have a great visual power and tell other stories.”
It is a democratising approach that could not have been attempted with other art forms without a sacrifice in quality, and the results speak for themselves. Where else would you pass by Robert Mapplethorpe’s twin Self-portraits from 1980, only to be caught instead by the anonymous Post-mortem of a Little Girl from c.1865, her eyes closed as peacefully as Fitz’s.
Equally comparable are several images of children with guns; William Klein’s Life Is Good & Good For You, 1956, shows three kids pointing revolvers directly at the viewer. Displayed alongside are images from unknown photographers, including Mike Patterson on the Veranda Pointing A Rifle at the Photographer, 1932, and Girl and Boy Together or Each Aiming A Gun, c.1955-70. How are we to distinguish between the two styles? Do Klein’s images have more weight given his name and profession? If anything, the nonchalance of the anonymous photos conveys the juxtaposition of violence and innocence with a more effective shock, even if this was perhaps not the intention of the original image at a time when gun control was not such a prevalent issue.
Arranged thematically, the exhibition does not give specific attention to photography as Art with a capital ‘A’ until the final room. At this point, and after so much build up, the sudden distinction feels oddly reductive. It is clear the ‘Art’ classification here really means ‘Abstract Art’, as evidenced by the daguerreotype of Frost on a Window that was shot only ten years after Fritz’s first Self-portrait. The subtle image shows that abstraction is as inherent to the photographic medium as it is to life itself. The images throughout the rest of the room are loosely connected through esoteric forms, tight crops, or disjointed, collaged editing. There is a focus on optical effects, both in their subject (Gordon H. Coster’s Wire Sculpture, c.1935) and in camera (Herbert Matter, Light Drawing, 1943). A titillating visual comparison is drawn between the raking shadows of Paul Strand’s From the Viaduct, 125th Street, New York, 1916, and Edward Weston’s nude of Miriam Lerner, 1922.
But it seems that the levelling effect of platforming anonymous photographers alongside household names means that to now introduce the final room under the title of ‘Photography Becomes Art’ diminishes the relevance of this category. Sally Mann’s portrait of her daughter, Jessie #34, would not have been out of place in ‘At Home’, surrounded by other intimate images of children taken by their mothers. Several of the confected adverts from ‘Seeing is Believing’, with their visual tricks to draw in customers, are full of inherently artistic qualities – might they have been included here if their function was not to sell sugar lumps?
The same dichotomy is true for Warhol, examples of whose work are included in both ‘Photography Becomes Art’ and ‘Death and Disaster’ (the name of this room is taken from Warhol’s celebrated yet gruesome series). His work conveys much more potency in the latter, however, not because of any gulf in stylistic quality but because of the narratives the piece contributes to. His screen print Birmingham Race Riot, 1964, employs a stark chiaroscuro to depict a Black man hounded by police and dogs while protesting in Birmingham, Alabama, after a series of bombings targeted at its African American community in 1963. The work is paired with the equally stylised, but rather more painterly, collage print by Louis Lo Monaco, The use of dogs to fight men is an act of cowardice – and only the users are degraded, 1963. Both pieces act to condemn police brutality but together demonstrate that no matter the artistry of its presentation, a photo’s primary function is as a narrative device. This intriguing interplay between depth and face value underpins the whole show.
The clearest exploration of this duality comes at the start of the exhibition, with examples from Robert Frank’s seminal photographic book The Americans contrasted against a wall of magazine front covers. Sombre monochrome vignettes stand facing technicolour spreads, exemplifying the gulf between the American Dream and American reality.
In this room I recognised one of Frank’s images (Trolley, 1955) from another major photography exhibition, Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum last year. Occasionally, paintings will tour different institutions and exhibitions, and it is often a thrill to catch them on their journeys. Yet, to experience two distinct but identical objects in this way hammers home the potency that photography achieves through its ability to saturate the cultural psyche via its own repetition. Its ubiquity is its greatest strength, and central to the success of the Rijksmuseum’s exhibition is the ability to touch upon so many facets of Americana through the eyes and skills of those to whom they meant the most. The result is a composited yet faithful image of America, with impressive resolution.
Words/Photos Marcus Howard- Vyse American Photography
American Photography runs until 9 June 2025
Visit