You know America has arrived at the Rijksmuseum the moment you enter the wide green expanse of Museumplein: looking down from a billboard on the building’s elaborate neogothic facade, a pair of gigantic eyes are watching you, glaring from mirror lenses with a persistent stare. Vastly enlarged, “America Seen Through Stars and Stripes”, Ming Smith’s portrait of a coolly indifferent Black man in reflective shades, head silhouetted against a United States flag, framed by a mesh of white bars, unnerves and intrigues. It recalls Dr Eckleburg’s all-seeing eyes gazing in judgment from a hoarding in The Great Gatsby.
Half documentary, half surreal, Smith’s 1976 New York picture introduces the Rijksmuseum’s exceptional, unexpected and utterly engrossing exhibition American Photography, a tale of glamour and violence, greed and tenderness, as evocative as Gatsby.
It spans nearly three centuries and a kaleidoscope of faces and places, the communal — an anonymous Kansas daguerreotype “Boys Playing Marbles”, 1850; a postcard featuring “12,000 Employees of the Ford Motor Company, Detroit” outside their factory, 1913 — starring alongside individuals forlorn or devastated. Saul Leiter’s lone figure on the kerbside, “Street Scene” (1947), is alienated, mysterious, beautiful. Nina Berman’s “Marine Wedding” chronicles the marriage in 2006 of mutilated Iraq War veteran Tyler Ziegel, a plastic dome replacing his broken skull, and his childhood sweetheart Renee Kline. The bride appears grief-stricken, the couple divorced within a year and Ziegel died at 30 from an overdose.
The first such major survey in a European museum, American Photography, drawn from the Rijksmuseum’s eclectic collection plus well-targeted loans, is timely, launched as Europe struggles to understand Trumpian America. Installed thematically — “Face to Face”, “At Home”, “On the Road”, “Selling Points”, “Death and Disaster” — it records how the camera has eyed the country in reportage, advertisements, protest posters, family and amateur snapshots, photo-booth strips, memorabilia.
Throughout, the Stars and Stripes performs as a chorus of hope and despair: on a cigarette packet promoting Dwight Eisenhower (“I like Ike”); constructed from red-, white- and blue-tipped matches, one aflame, the whole edifice a flimsy balancing act, in Bill Stettner’s “Stars and Stripes Forever?”; in tatters in Louis Lo Monaco’s collage prints for Washington’s “We Shall Overcome” march.
In the opening display, the flag billows gloomily against a brick wall and window, obscuring the woman watching a city pageant in Robert Frank’s “Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey”. Frank’s grainy, low-lit, cropped critiques — “Trolley — New Orleans” shows rows of eager passengers glancing from bus windows, the Black travellers bunched at the back — were published in The Americans in 1960, to vitriolic reviews. Classics of American discontent, his monochromes here face a wall of contemporaneous glossy magazine covers, House Beautiful, Seventeen, McCall’s, where material girls breezily equate stuff — hats, lipstick, cars — with happiness and success.
“The American dream,” says Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits, “is shaped by photography.” Even mid-Depression, studio images such as James van der Zee’s retouched photographs brought Hollywood panache to Harlem, for example a crystalline, confident “Portrait of an Unknown Man”, still enjoying the limelight despite being nameless.
Postwar, a plethora of amateur snaps, now faded and precious, self-staged the dream. The Black mother and her children, trustingly smiling, dressed to the nines in fur and jaunty caps — the little boy in a coat surely bought too big in order to last — pose with the flair of professional models in “Family Standing Beside Their Cadillac, Baltimore” (1962). More than any advertisement, that intimate trio driving out one sunny winter morning captures aspirations for the good life.
Yet you fear for these children: metres away in Jack Jenkins’ “Elizabeth Eckford Arriving at Little Rock Central High School” (1957), a Black girl stands proud while hostile screaming white women stalk her path into a just-desegregated classroom. Such faultlines of race and class, war and peace, man versus nature, recur: photography’s inevitable subjects as it developed in parallel with American history.
The earliest image, “Self-Portrait” (1840), is an experimental daguerreotype for which telescope manufacturer Henry Fitz shut his eyes to the light for several minutes. The technique quickly caught on: in Missouri, Thomas Easterly depicted “Chief Keokuk”, wizened and imposing in his bear-claw necklace, in 1847, and charismatic Black barber Robert Wilkinson, acclaimed among “the Coloured Aristocracy of St Louis” in 1858.
A photograph of a whipped enslaved person, “The Scourged Back, Baton Rouge, Louisiana”, was an abolitionist carte de visite in 1863. A miniature portrait, “Union Soldier” (1864), was worn on the inside of a gold brooch, next to the heart. Aesthetics, emotional appeal and social issues became inseparable; photography entered everyday existence.
The exquisite “Frost on a Window, Boston” (1850) memorialises fleeting quotidian splendour — Walt Whitman’s transcendentalist Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855 — and anticipates self-conscious art photography. It hangs with Paul Strand’s shadow patterns “From the Viaduct, 125th Street, New York” (1916) and Aaron Siskind’s “Abstract” (1948), garbage photographed close up to resemble blots and swirls in abstract expressionist painting.
Photography took a century to be considered art. It happened first in 20th-century America because — and this capitalist imperative dominates the entire show — competition, in a nation insatiably consuming advertising and entertainment images, had long forced commercial photographers to be inventive and original. Seldom shown in museums, their avant garde credentials here are revelatory.
A young man’s laughing face fractured by thick black lines, suggesting a playful cubist Picasso, is “I’m all cut up”, an advertisement for Kahn Brothers tailors, Kentucky, in 1911. Schadde Brothers’ 1915 display sample of sweets, hand-painted in colour, is a vision of plenty arranged as a modernist grid — geometric abstraction seductive and shaped to sell. Exploiting the look half a century later, Andy Warhol launched pop art.
Even the American sublime turns out to have its entrepreneurial twin. Carleton Watkins’ “Cathedral Rock, Yosemite” (1861), a stark monochrome — monumental, bare, made with the laborious wet-plate method — appeals as a celebration of nature pristine and untouched. But Watkins composed as reverent an image of destruction: graceful, symmetrical arches of water jets in “Hydraulic Mining, Malakoff Diggins”, eroding mountains to find gold in Sierra Nevada, photographed to attract investors.
Although some famous artists are here, their works are mostly repurposed or atypical: Walker Evans’ provincial main street “County Seat of Hale County, Alabama” as wartime propaganda; Ansel Adams’ grand sequoias reproduced minutely on an Ahwahnee Hotel menu-card; Irving Penn’s battered workman’s “Mud Glove”, as crisply detailed as his fashion prints. The show’s real achievement is highlighting the unknown and thus surprising us still with America’s immense diversity, contradictions, fragility.
Like Golden Age paintings in 17th-century Holland, photography — democratic, widely accessible, fast, innovative — created American identity. The Rijksmuseum’s generous, far-ranging exhibition expresses that open spirit.
To June 9, rijksmuseum.nl
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