Nederlands Fotomuseum Reopens in Rotterdam

The Nederlands Fotomuseum—the country’s national photography museum—will reopen this week in a renovated warehouse in the port of Rotterdam, on the south bank of the Maas River. The reconstructed six-story columnar building was built in the early 20th century and was originally used to store coffee exported from Brazil but remained empty for many years before being registered as a national monument. The museum, founded in 2003, acquired the building in 2023 through a private donor, although it also received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Municipality of Rotterdam.

Without diminishing the modern reality of photographic destruction, the aim of the museum is to show the history of photography in its own way. What is the responsibility of the art museum in the uncertain age of AI? Here, it is still deeply tied to analog history that deserves to be celebrated: “a legacy that needs care and knowledge,” Martijn van den Broek, head of collections, who has been working with the museum for 25 years, told the Observer.

The newly renovated building houses one of the world’s largest collections of museum photography, as well as materials such as vintage cameras, guidebooks, negatives, slides and prints. Across the second and third floors, climate-controlled facilities house the museum’s collection and its digitization and conservation areas. These spaces are open to the public, with windows that give visitors a view of the delicate processes that take place there. It is a more humble relative of the mise-en-scène of the neighboring Depot of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which opened its archive to visitors in 2021.

The fourth and fifth floors of the Nederlands Fotomuseum can host two temporary photo exhibitions. The inaugural show, “Awakening in Blue: An Ode to Cyanotype” (on view through June 7), features the work of 15 artists who use this timeless technique. The first is a reproduction from Anna Atkins, a mainstay of the cyanotype technique in her algae paintings (gelidium corneum, polysiphonia spinulosa…) in the 19th century. Today, artists like Farah Rahman and Sarojini Lewis use this technique to decolonize history. Photo by Arash Fakhim Sophrey a series of textile cyanotypes are combined with fabrics that reimagine the fabric of Iranian culture, while Marijn Kuijper’s embroidered quotations from the Dutch law restricting criminal families are placed over the cyanotypes of negatives.

Another temporary exhibition, “Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – now” (on view until May 24), is unfortunately a bleak mix of photographs of a deserted city, lacking its vitality and reading like an urban brochure. (However, an inkjet print from Paul Citroen’s photo collage—The city1923, shown several stories below—shows how exciting, bustling and crowded the cityscape is.)

The museum’s permanent exhibition on the first floor is aptly named the “Gallery of Honor,” and presents examples of photography in the Netherlands from the 19th century to the present day. The collection compresses Dutch photography into 99 images, with names ranging from national to international fame, such as Anton Corbijn, Viviane Sassen, Rineke Dijkstra and Erwin Olaf, as well as lesser-known practitioners.

There are images of pop culture celebrities, such as a gelatin silver print of Tupac Shakur looking askance at Dana Lixenberg from 1993, or Cor Jaring’s close-up photo of John Lennon and Yoko in bed, showing peace at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam in 1969. Peter Hunter (né Otto Saloped sister of London F. Kennedy at his birthday party in London F. Kennedy) motion blur that shows the spontaneity of the image.

There are various images from the Second World War, most of which are attributed to them. Perhaps most touching is the combination of passport photos taken with a Polyfoto camera featuring a smiling Anne Frank, a chilling document because the viewer, of course, knows her fate: she would die five years later in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. The least prominent, unless you scan the QR code, is Henk van der Horst’s Zuiderpark Swimming Poolhe was shot from a bird’s eye view in The Hague in 1938. The happy geometry of the New Pictures image is contradicted by the fact that the photographer joined the Dutch army and was killed in a concentration camp. Up close, Hans Poley’s image is faint only if you read the caption: The People on the Roof Terrace of the Place They Are HidingHaarlem, 1943. It shows a group of white men and women hiding on rocks and potatoes being peeled—an innocent scene that foretells that their hiding place was discovered and the Gestapo captured them in 1944. In the same year, in Amsterdam, Charles Breijer kept the Rolleiflex hidden in the pictures of his German bicycle and his dangerous bicycle. revenge.

The images of women in this selection feel powerful. At the beginning of the timeline is a beautiful nude portrait of Katharina Behrend from 1908, who organizes her representation as a muse only for herself. Paul Citroen’s 1931 portrait of Estella Reed, a dancer, shows her in an attractively informal pose, tilting her head so that her cheek is cupped in her hand and strands of her hair loose, she is not pretentious or self-conscious. Photographer Jaap J. Herschel’s documentation of a birth control and abortion rights protest in Utrecht in 1970 includes a line of young women from the Dutch feminist group Dolle Mina, lifting up their shirts to reveal the words BAAS IN EIGEN BUIK (BOSS OF OUR BELLY). In the 21st century, Meryem Slimani’s Instagram page was digitized, circulating posts showing her mother stylishly decked out in streetwear and traditional Moroccan clothing. The work received attention when it was included in the Sedelijk Museum Schiedam’s 2019-2020 exhibition on modest fashion. “Our story is now part of Dutch cultural history,” Slimani said in one post.

Although the Gallery of Honor was located in the museum’s previous location across the river, a newly installed timeline detailing the history of photography—internationally and in the Netherlands—strengthens viewers’ understanding of its power. Dutch tax authorities recognized “photographer” as a profession in 1857. By 1900, police stations were capturing criminals, which they would list in albums. In 1933, an art school in Amsterdam started a photography department, which was followed by the opening of a dedicated school of technical photography in 1940. In 1958, the Sedelijk Museum in Amsterdam began to collect photographs, and in 1971, the first photo gallery was opened in the same city. In 2000, the verb “to Photoshop” was added to the Dutch dictionary.

This local history is in conversation with radical changes in social practices of writing and self-expression. Who would have guessed that a museum would be citing an AI-generated photo of Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket that went viral in 2023? The real question is, with such rapid advances in artificial intelligence, what do we expect next?

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