Rotterdam’s Reopened Photography Museum Celebrates the Medium’s Material Nature

The Nederlands Fotomuseum—the country’s national museum of photography—reopens this week in a renovated warehouse in Rotterdam’s harbor, located on the south bank of the River Maas. The repurposed six-story cast-iron column structure was built at the turn of the 20th Century and originally used to store coffee shipped from Brazil but stood 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, though it also received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Municipality of Rotterdam.

Without minimizing the contemporary reality of photographic dematerialization, the museum’s intention is to show the history of photography in its objecthood. What is a photography museum’s responsibility in the uncertain age of A.I.? Here, it is still deeply tied to an analog history that is worth celebrating: it’s a “heritage that requires care and knowledge,” Martijn van den Broek, head of collections, who has been with the museum for 25 years, told Observer.

The newly rehabilitated structure houses one of the largest museum collections of photography in the world, as well as accoutrements 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 hubs. These spaces are public-facing, with windows that offer visitors a look at the fragile processes happening there. It’s a much more modest mise-en-scène relative to the neighboring Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which opened its stored collection to visitors in 2021.

The Nederlands Fotomuseum’s fourth and fifth floors can accommodate two temporary photography exhibitions. The opening show, “Awakening in Blue: An Ode to Cyanotype” (on view through June 7), features work by 15 contemporary artists who have used this lensless historical technique. First up are reproductions from Anna Atkins, a pillar of the cyanotype method in her cataloguing of algae (gelidium corneum, polysiphonia spinulosa…) in the 19th Century. Today, artists like Farah Rahman and Sarojini Lewis use this technique to demystify colonial history. Arash Fakhim’s Sofreh series of cyanotypes on textiles is hemmed to fabrics that reimagine the traditional Iranian ritual cloth, while Marijn Kuijper’s embroidered quotes of Dutch legislation limiting queer families are layered upon cyanotypes of negatives.

The other temporary exhibition, “Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – now” (on view through May 24), is unfortunately a dull compilation of people-free topographies of the city, revealing none of its dynamism and reading more like an urban brochure. (And yet, an inkjet print from a photo collage by Paul Citroen—Metropolis, 1923, displayed several floors below—shows how exciting, frenzied and dense the depiction of a city can be.)

The museum’s first-floor permanent exhibition is grandly dubbed “The Gallery of Honour,” and it presents a sampling of photography in the Netherlands spanning from the 19th Century to the present day. The collection compresses Dutch photography into 99 photographs, featuring names who have risen from national to international acclaim, such as Anton Corbijn, Viviane Sassen, Rineke Dijkstra and Erwin Olaf, alongside lesser-known practitioners.

There are portraits of famous pop culture figureheads, like a gelatin silver print of Tupac Shakur looking askance by Dana Lixenberg from 1993, or Cor Jaring’s close-up shot of John Lennon and Yoko in bed, demonstrating for peace at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam in 1969. Peter Hunter (né Otto Salomon) snapped John F. Kennedy at his sister’s birthday party in London without flash, the blur of movement reflecting the spontaneity of the photo.

There are various images from World War II, most of them implicit in their charge. Perhaps the most heart-stopping is a compilation of passport photos taken with a Polyfoto camera featuring a sweetly grinning Anne Frank, the document a chilling one because the viewer, of course, knows her fate: she would die five years later in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Less overt, unless you scan the QR code, is Henk van der Horst’s Zuiderpark Swimming Pool, shot from a bird’s-eye view in The Hague circa 1938. The cheerful geometry of the New Photography image is belied by the fact that the photographer joined the Dutch resistance and was murdered in a concentration camp. Nearby, Hans Poley’s image only feels bleak when you read the caption: People on the Roof Terrace of Their Hiding Place, Haarlem, 1943. It shows a group of dapper men and women crouched over gravel and peeling potatoes—an innocuous scene that does not foretell that their hiding place was discovered and the Gestapo captured them in 1944. The same year, in Amsterdam, Charles Breijer kept a concealed Rolleiflex in his bicycle bag and provocatively took photos of German authorities despite the high risk of retribution.

The images of women in this selection feel empowered. Early in the timeline is a beautiful nude self-portrait by Katharina Behrend from 1908, orchestrating her own representation as a muse only to herself. Paul Citroen’s 1931 portrait of Estella Reed, a dancer, shows her in a charmingly informal way, tilting her head so her cheek is cradled in her hand and strands of her hair fall loose, neither self-stylized nor self-conscious. Press photographer Jaap J. Herschel’s documentation of a demonstration for birth control and abortion rights in Utrecht in 1970 features a lineup of young women from the Dutch feminist group Dolle Mina, lifting their shirts up to reveal the words BAAS IN EIGEN BUIK (BOSS OF OUR BELLY). In the 21st Century, Meryem Slimani’s Instagram page is digitized, rotating through posts showing her mother stylishly outfitted in a mélange of streetwear and traditional Moroccan clothing. The work got attention when it was included in a Stedelijk Museum Schiedam exhibition in 2019-2020 about modest fashion. “Our story is now part of Dutch cultural history,” Slimani captioned one post.

Although the Gallery of Honour existed in the museum’s previous space across the river, a newly added timeline explaining 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 photographing criminals, whom they catalogued in albums. In 1933, an art school in Amsterdam debuted a photography department, followed by the opening of a dedicated professional photo school in 1940. In 1958, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam started collecting photography, and in 1971, the first photo gallery opened in the same city. In 2000, the verb “to Photoshop” was added to the Dutch dictionary.

This local history is in conversation with sweeping changes to society’s habits of documentation and self-depiction. Who would have guessed that a museum would cite an A.I.-generated image of octogenarian Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket widely diffused in 2023? The real question is, with such rapid-fire evolutions in synthetic images, what awaits us next?

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