The Rijksmuseum presents the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe. With more than 200 works spanning three centuries, American Photography will be an exploration of the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States, showing how the medium has permeated every aspect of our lives: in art, news, advertising and everyday life.

Over the past decade, the Rijksmuseum has built an extensive collection of American Photography. This exhibition is the first ever presentation of Rijksmuseum’s collection, which will be shown together with loans from over 30 collections in the United States, the Netherlands and other European countries. Works by icons including Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus and James Van Der Zee will be on view alongside eye-opening photographs by unknown and anonymous photographers.

The exhibition is possible by Rijksmuseum’s major partnership with Baker McKenzie. American Photography runs from 7 February to 9 June 2025. Concurrently with American Photography, Carrie Mae Weems’s 2021 series Painting the Town will be on show in the Rijksmuseum’s photography gallery.

american photography

American Photography will give picture of the country through the eyes of American photographers, showing the country in all its complexity. The exhibition takes themes such as the American dream, landscapes and portraiture to trace how photographers increasingly reflected on changes and events in their country. A major topic of the show is photography’s evolution as an art form, from 19th-century daguerreotypes of frost flowers on a window to the work of Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, Dawoud Bey and Sarah Sense. Another important theme is how photography has grown to be a part of everyday life, which is demonstrated by family portraits, advertisements, postcards, gramophone record covers and more.

the Rijksmuseum photography collection

The photography collection of the Rijksmuseum comprises a representational overview of the history of photography in almost 200,000 vintage prints, photo albums, photo books and other exceptional photographic works. It includes acknowledged masterpieces by leading photographers such as Anna Atkins, Gustave Le Gray, Brassaï, Helen Levitt and Ed van der Elsken, as well as examples of the application of photography in advertising, fashion, journalism and science.
Rijksmuseum’s photography curators are Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, who have been stewarding the photography collection since the 1990s. Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom received the AIPAD award in 2023. They are the first non-US winners of this prestigious American prize. In recent years they have been focusing primarily on collecting photography from America, which has been one of the most important countries in this field since the 1950s.

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