A Long, Hard Look at America

One of the strangest works of art in the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, is a painting by Jan Jansz Mostaert, who was born in Haarlem. It dates from around 1535 and bears the title “Landscape with an Episode from the Conquest of America.” In the right of the picture, a platoon of soldiers, heavily armed and preceded by a pair of gun carriages, tramp through a defile. Evidently, it is not long since they came ashore; behind them, we can spy a strip of beach. Preparing to meet them is an angry band of what Mostaert, who certainly never crossed the Atlantic, imagined the people of the New World to be like. Mostly men, some of them elderly, all of them white, and all as naked as babies, they brandish longbows at their aggressors. Around them, the country seems no less fantastical—jagged outcrops of pale rock, rising from low brown hillocks. A bearded old man, in a cage made of wooden bars, surveys the scene from on high. In the foreground, away from the commotion, a rust-red cow grazes peacefully, while a hare is shown in mid-leap. Perched atop a broken tree is a monkey, which turns toward us as if to ask, “Who are the animals here?”

Peel yourself away from Mostaert’s painting, cross to a different wing of the museum, and you will find another bunch of Americans defending their way of life. To be precise, four young Latinas in a car—all of them brightly bejewelled, three of them tattooed. Their makeup is a work of art in itself. The picture is called “Homegirls, San Francisco,” and it dates from 2008. It was taken by the photographer Amanda López, who was born to Mexican parents in Sacramento, and who became fascinated by lowrider culture. (“I grew up with my cousin and his dad, they were always fixing Impalas,” López said in an interview in 2023.) The image, which is one of a set of lowrider photographs acquired by the Smithsonian, is dominated by the driver of the car, who rests her elbow on the edge of the open window and stares straight at us with a confidence that is at once challenging and completely relaxed.

“Homegirls, San Francisco” is part of a major exhibition, “American Photography,” which runs at the Rijksmuseum until June 9th. The show is, in the best sense, all over the place. Rather than adhering to a firmly chronological format, it darts to and fro through the decades. The rooms are organized by theme. A section of portraits, for example, accommodates both a rare daguerreotype from 1840—a photograph taken by Henry Fitz, Jr., of his own face, his eyes closed as if he were asleep—and a marvellously detailed ink-jet print by Bryan Schutmaat, which dates from 2010. Titled “Paul, Bozeman, Montana,” it depicts a guy at a bar, in a blue T-shirt and jeans. His lost and rheumy gaze, like the lines on his forehead and the gray grizzle of his beard, makes you wonder what troubles the poor fellow hasn’t seen, and sends your thoughts irrepressibly to the second floor of the Rijksmuseum, where the brow of Rembrandt, visible in his “Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul,” from 1661, is equally riven with care. The two men could be brothers, although only one of them holds a glass of beer.

In geographical terms, too, “American Photography” roams free. We see everything from the cover of a Holiday magazine—the issue of December, 1955, complete with palm trees, Christmas gifts, and the optimistic tagline “You’ll want to go to Florida when you read Budd Schulberg’s brilliant report”—to an amazing shot of what appears to be the surface of a crater-studded moon. In fact, it’s a view of the Yucca Flat nuclear-testing site, in Nevada, taken in 1996, and the craters were formed not by ancient meteor strikes but by the subsidence that follows a detonation underground. There’s also a fine quartet of New York street scenes, including “Emigrants, Queer man & Baggage, South Ferry, Manhattan,” which was taken by Alice Austen, in 1896. As visitors to the Alice Austen House, in Staten Island, will be aware, Austen rewards further investigation, and I only wish that the Rijksmuseum had found room for “Trude & I masked, short skirts,” from 1891, in which Austen photographs herself and a friend smoking at each other. It’s like a Diane Arbus setup, seventy years in advance.

The sorriest sight in the exhibition is both wide-ranging and highly specific, covering a lot of ground in one day. On June 8, 1968, the photographer Paul Fusco was on the train that bore the body of Robert Kennedy, who had been assassinated three days before, from New York to Washington. Fusco was working for Look magazine, and what he looked at, through his lens, were those who gathered beside the railroad tracks to pay their respects. Here, in pieces, was mourning in America. At the Rijksmuseum, however, we get not just a resonant Fusco shot but something else—photographs taken by the public, as the cortège drew near or trundled past. The snapshots (just a few of the many that have been patiently tracked down and assembled by the Dutch artist Rein Jelle Terpstra) are square in format and awkwardly composed. The colors have faded to a kind of sifted haze. Does memory degrade in the same way, or do the people who watched the train go by, fifty-seven years ago, still see it, as crisp as painted livery, in their mind’s eye?

If you are a New Yorker, you may have seen those snapshots before. In 2018, they were displayed in “RFK Funeral Train: the People’s View,” at the International Center of Photography. What makes them stand out at the Rijksmuseum, energized afresh, is that they set the tone for the whole enterprise. The exhibit was conceived in 2017, and the curators, Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, made it a matter of principle, while borrowing from other institutions, to amass material from private collections and auction houses, too. “There is no other land where photography is so closely entwined with the course of its history,” Boom writes in the exhibition catalogue, and the result of that entwining is a wealth of visual stuff—a sun-warmed advertisement for Motorola radios, endorsed by the married actors Dick Powell and June Allyson, from the pages of Life, or a crumpled mini-portrait from a photo booth. In neither case do we know the photographer’s identity. Here is a haven for the amateur, the anonymous, and the forgotten.

The concluding section of the show, it’s true, is dedicated to the proposition that “Photography Becomes Art,” and it proves the point with Sally Mann’s grandly beautiful closeup of her daughter’s face (2004), and with two semi-abstract nudes (1918-19), tightly cropped, by Charles Sheeler. Yet the rest of the exhibition urges us to question what, exactly, is so fine about fine art, and what can get missed or ignored in the quest for finesse. Twenty years or more after Sheeler produced those nudes, he shot the photographs for a leaflet, “Souvenir of Your Trip Through the Ford Rouge Plant.” That leaflet is laid out, in all its dull splendor, in an earlier room.

In a similar vein, we see a 1961 poster for Texas highways (“Over 60,000 miles of motoring adventure”) replete with images by nameless photographers. More casual, and far more intimate, is the arsenal of gun shots—regular Americans, children as well as adults, toting their weaponry for the camera, and for the nervous amusement of their friends and relatives. My favorite picture in the show is a peace offering, from 1907, which has the force of a compacted short story: two young women in high collars and hats, next to which someone has scribbled, “This was taken after I had a fight with my best.” And the very first thing you see, as you enter the exhibition, is not a flat image at all but an object: a homemade cube built from strips of folded Marlboro packs, with a space on each side for a photograph. Each space is filled by the face of a young African American. Somebody, somewhere, took the time to construct this delicate shrine to companionship.

The cube was found in a flea market by a New York collector, whose trove of discoveries came to the notice of Rooseboom and Boom. “We went to a warehouse in Brooklyn and it was all there,” Boom told me. (It’s always a warehouse in Brooklyn.) Some of what they unearthed in the course of their searching bears careful inspection. We see a church fan, say, from 1967, with a paddle made of card; on one side is an advertisement for Hart Funeral Service, of Asheville, North Carolina, and on the other is a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. What, you might ask, is the fan doing here? Well, to borrow a distinction from mathematics, the emphasis throughout the show is more on applied photography than on pure photography—on the uses, from the celebratory to the bitter and the whimsical, to which the medium has been put.

The nation that emerges from “American Photography,” in short, is not just a powerhouse of moral, commercial, and political purpose but an engine for repurposing. This can be performed with wit; for a New York-themed issue of Flair magazine, in 1950, Saul Steinberg decorates photographs of the city with a frolic of lines and figures, transforming it into a playground. A chest of drawers is transformed into a skyscraper, as if by a wizard’s charm. At the other extreme, consider a photograph of a formerly enslaved Black man, from around 1863. He is shown from behind, with one arm crooked and his head turned in profile: a formal pose, the better to show the network of scars, like the roots of a tree, that cover his bare back. To how many floggings they testify one can barely imagine. The picture is tiny, and with good reason, because it was, in fact, deployed as a carte de visite—handed out by abolitionists as an efficient means of conveying the evils of slavery. This combination of polite social convenience and deep wounds, designed to shock the system, continues to shock the eye.

Even for the big names, the distinction between the pure and the pragmatic holds fast. Robert Mapplethorpe is here, as you’d expect, with two self-portraits, one of them so nakedly puckish that it verges on the diabolical; yet what sticks with you, in another room, is a picture that he took of the band Television for the cover of their début album, “Marquee Moon,” in 1977. Thanks in part to a jarring adjustment of the colors, they look like alien immigrants suffering from space lag. (Two years earlier, Mapplethorpe had been responsible for the black-and-white shot of Patti Smith that adorned her album “Horses.” Could it be the most widely distributed image in the Mapplethorpe corpus?) Likewise, a famous Walker Evans photograph from 1936, “Main Street of County Seat, Alabama,” is displayed not in its original form but in a later incarnation, as the basis of a wartime poster in 1942. Any stillness and tension have been dispelled; the photograph has been blown up and colorized, with a line of green trees added in the background and a yellow banner pasted across the top—“This is America . . .” Down at the bottom the slogan is completed: “. . . Keep it Free!”

Free enterprise, free expression, free trade, freedom of movement, the freedom to vote, and also the freedom to quash and to destroy: such are the liberties that are examined and interrogated by “American Photography.” To say the least, it’s quite a moment for such a show. For the first time since the Second World War, the bedrock of understanding between the United States and Europe has begun to crack. Mark Rutte, who was the Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 2010 to 2024, is now the secretary-general of NATO, an organization that President Trump regards with an indifference bordering on contempt. Nobody at the Rijksmuseum could have foreseen the cultural ground shifting so rapidly underfoot. To be sure, a single exhibition will change little, and solve even less, but inviting young Europeans to look at the varieties of American experience on the walls of the Rijksmuseum is, you could argue, one way to gauge whether, and for how long, they will still look to the United States, as a destination and a dream.

Should they require a particular role model, “American Photography,” ever helpful, can supply that, too. In 1851, a Dutchman, Walther van Erven Dorens, emigrated from Amsterdam to San Francisco. There, he joined a fire brigade as a volunteer, and a daguerreotype preserves his pride in the appointment. He stands in uniform, with one hand on his hip and another on a ladder—a tool of his perilous trade. He has made the odyssey from the Old World to the New, in pursuit of a better life. Whether he has found it, and how he will flourish, there is no way of knowing. His eyes give nothing away.♦