The Nederlands Fotomuseum Reopens in Rotterdam

The Nederlands Fotomuseum—the nation’s nationwide museum of images—reopens this week in a renovated warehouse in Rotterdam’s harbor, positioned on the south financial institution of the River Maas. The repurposed six-story cast-iron column construction was constructed on the flip of the twentieth Century and initially used to retailer espresso shipped from Brazil however stood empty for a few years earlier than being registered as a nationwide monument. The museum, based in 2003, acquired the constructing in 2023 via a personal donor, although it additionally obtained funding from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Municipality of Rotterdam.

Without minimizing the modern actuality of photographic dematerialization, the museum’s intention is to point out the historical past of images in its objecthood. What is a images museum’s duty within the unsure age of A.I.? Here, it’s nonetheless deeply tied to an analog historical past that’s price 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, informed Observer.

The newly rehabilitated construction homes one of many largest museum collections of images on this planet, in addition to accoutrements similar to classic cameras, guidebooks, negatives, slides and prints. Across the second and third flooring, climate-controlled amenities home the museum’s assortment and its digitization and conservation hubs. These areas are public-facing, with home windows that supply guests a have a look at the delicate processes occurring there. It’s a way more modest mise-en-scène relative to the neighboring Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which opened its saved assortment to guests in 2021.

The Nederlands Fotomuseum’s fourth and fifth flooring can accommodate two short-term images exhibitions. The opening present, “Awakening in Blue: An Ode to Cyanotype” (on view via June 7), options work by 15 modern artists who’ve used this lensless historic approach. First up are reproductions from Anna Atkins, a pillar of the cyanotype technique in her cataloguing of algae (gelidium corneum, polysiphonia spinulosa…) within the nineteenth Century. Today, artists like Farah Rahman and Sarojini Lewis use this method to demystify colonial historical past. Arash Fakhim’s Sofreh sequence of cyanotypes on textiles is hemmed to materials that reimagine the standard Iranian ritual material, whereas Marijn Kuijper’s embroidered quotes of Dutch laws limiting queer households are layered upon cyanotypes of negatives.

The different short-term exhibition, “Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – now” (on view via May 24), is sadly a boring compilation of people-free topographies of the town, revealing none of its dynamism and studying extra like an city brochure. (And but, an inkjet print from a photograph collage by Paul Citroen—Metropolis, 1923, displayed a number of flooring beneath—reveals how thrilling, frenzied and dense the depiction of a metropolis will be.)

The museum’s first-floor everlasting exhibition is grandly dubbed “The Gallery of Honour,” and it presents a sampling of images within the Netherlands spanning from the nineteenth Century to the current day. The assortment compresses Dutch images into 99 images, that includes names who’ve risen from nationwide to worldwide acclaim, similar to Anton Corbijn, Viviane Sassen, Rineke Dijkstra and Erwin Olaf, alongside lesser-known practitioners.

There are portraits of well-known popular culture figureheads, like a gelatin silver print of Tupac Shakur wanting askance by Dana Lixenberg from 1993, or Cor Jaring’s close-up shot of John Lennon and Yoko in mattress, demonstrating for peace on the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam in 1969. Peter Hunter (né Otto Salomon) snapped John F. Kennedy at his sister’s celebration in London with out flash, the blur of motion reflecting the spontaneity of the photograph.

There are varied photos from World War II, most of them implicit of their cost. Perhaps essentially the most heart-stopping is a compilation of passport photographs taken with a Polyfoto digital camera that includes a sweetly grinning Anne Frank, the doc a chilling one as a result of the viewer, in fact, is aware of her destiny: she would die 5 years later in Bergen-Belsen focus camp in Germany. Less overt, except you scan the QR code, is Henk van der Horst’s Zuiderpark Swimming Pool, shot from a fowl’s-eye view in The Hague circa 1938. The cheerful geometry of the New Photography picture is belied by the truth that the photographer joined the Dutch resistance and was murdered in a focus camp. Nearby, Hans Poley’s picture solely feels bleak once you learn the caption: People on the Roof Terrace of Their Hiding Place, Haarlem, 1943. It reveals a bunch of dapper women and men crouched over gravel and peeling potatoes—an innocuous scene that doesn’t foretell that their hiding place was found and the Gestapo captured them in 1944. The identical yr, in Amsterdam, Charles Breijer saved a hid Rolleiflex in his bicycle bag and provocatively took photographs of German authorities regardless of the excessive danger of retribution.

The photos of ladies on this choice really feel empowered. Early within the timeline is a stupendous nude self-portrait by Katharina Behrend from 1908, orchestrating her personal illustration as a muse solely to herself. Paul Citroen’s 1931 portrait of Estella Reed, a dancer, reveals her in a charmingly casual manner, tilting her head so her cheek is cradled in her hand and strands of her hair fall unfastened, neither self-stylized nor self-conscious. Press photographer Jaap J. Herschel’s documentation of an indication for contraception and abortion rights in Utrecht in 1970 includes a lineup of younger ladies from the Dutch feminist group Dolle Mina, lifting their shirts as much as reveal the phrases BAAS IN EIGEN BUIK (BOSS OF OUR BELLY). In the twenty first Century, Meryem Slimani’s Instagram page is digitized, rotating via posts displaying her mom stylishly outfitted in a mélange of streetwear and conventional Moroccan clothes. The work received consideration when it was included in a Stedelijk Museum Schiedam exhibition in 2019-2020 about modest style. “Our story is now part of Dutch cultural history,” Slimani captioned one submit.

Although the Gallery of Honour existed within the museum’s earlier house throughout the river, a newly added timeline explaining the historical past of images—internationally and within the Netherlands—strengthens viewers’ understanding of its energy. Dutch tax authorities acknowledged “photographer” as a occupation in 1857. By 1900, police stations have been photographing criminals, whom they catalogued in albums. In 1933, an artwork college in Amsterdam debuted a images division, adopted by the opening of a devoted skilled photograph college in 1940. In 1958, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam began accumulating images, and in 1971, the primary photograph gallery opened in the identical metropolis. In 2000, the verb “to Photoshop” was added to the Dutch dictionary.

This native historical past is in dialog with sweeping adjustments to society’s habits of documentation and self-depiction. Who would have guessed {that a} museum would cite an A.I.-generated picture of octogenarian Pope Francis carrying a puffer jacket extensively subtle in 2023? The actual query is, with such rapid-fire evolutions in artificial photos, what awaits us subsequent?

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