Two women look out from adjacent windows of a brick apartment building, beneath an American flag that ripples in the wind. One of their faces falls in shadow, and the other is obscured by the stars and stripes.
This is photographer Robert Frank’s depiction of a parade in Hoboken, N.J., in 1955, from his series “The Americans.” The festivities may be on the street below, the photo seems to suggest, but the enthusiasm, or any sense of patriotism, is lost in a mood of gloom.
In “American Photography,” a vast new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a half dozen black-and-white photos from “The Americans” are displayed in the first room, on a wall opposite an array of colorful magazine pages from the same time, from Sports Illustrated, Life and House Beautiful.
The contrast is stark: Frank’s shots captured the isolation, yearning, and despair of American life — a far cry from the bright pastels on the optimistic, glossy covers.
Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, the two Dutch co-curators of “American Photography,” which opens Friday and runs through June 9, said that American photography has always reflected these two poles of the American self-image: an idyllic depiction and the reality.
“The American dream, for a large part, is shaped by photography,” said Taco Dibbits, the director of the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands’ national museum. That contrasts with Europe’s visual culture, he added, which has always been grounded in the fine arts, like painting and etchings. “In the United States, photography is emancipated, not only for use as an art form, but especially for the use in daily life,” he said.
The more than 220 pictures in the “American Photography” show do not, as one might expect, add up to a greatest hits album, or a look-book of the United States’ most celebrated photographers. Although the exhibition includes works by famous artists such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe, those are interspersed between snapshots taken by unknown shutterbugs, photo-booth strips, playing cards and pages from catalogs of colorful candies.
While the show explores various functions of photography in American life — how people displayed family albums at home, or used pictures to attract clients, or sent images of landscapes back East to lure pioneers to the West — it returns again and again to a central tension between how America would like to see itself, and how it really looks.
“One of the things that will make this historically a distinctive survey is the abundance of photographs and genres that are outside of the realm of fine art,” said Shannon Perich, a photography curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which loaned pictures to the exhibition.
The pictures depict both the optimism and the wreckage of the American dream, an idea that Boom said had shifted since the term was coined in the 1930s. At first it referred to an ideal “social order” she said, and later, in the 1950s, it was a wish for materialistic upward mobility. During the Civil Rights Movement, it became a quest for racial equality, Boom added, and then it bent again toward individuality.
The Rijksmuseum started collecting American photography 17 years ago, and its current trove includes 7,500 individual photographs and 1,500 photo books. To further expand their options, the co-curators also took four trips to the United States to scour public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Public Library, and museums in Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo. Boom said they traveled as much as possible on buses and trains, to get a view from the ground.
The curators made eight visits to a trove of photos amassed by a New York collector, Peter J. Cohen, who for more than three decades has been scouring flea markets, thrift stores, yard sales and eBay to buy images of unknown strangers. Boom and Rooseboom selected more than 170 pictures, which Cohen donated to the Rijksmuseum’s collection.
“Of all the themes in the show, the American dream is the easiest one to portray in photography,” said Cohen in a phone interview, “because so often it is an expression of freedom, or gaiety, or celebration.”
“Everybody loves getting their picture taken in their new car,” he added. “Women proudly pose with their new hat or new dress, and there are so many pictures of men displaying their recently-caught fish.”
But mostly, Americans just like to see themselves. Portraiture is one of the most popular photographic forms, and Americans were early adopters right back to the daguerreotype, a photo made on a small silvered copper plate. The earliest known American daguerreotype, a self-portrait of the photographer Henry Fitz Jr. from 1840 appears in “American Photography,” on loan from the Smithsonian.
“A few months after they succeeded in portraying a human being, all sorts of studios in New York were already off and running making commercial portraits,” Boom said. “At first, it was a sort of a privilege of white people, but later on, there were studios in Harlem, and then portraits of Native Americans. There was all this diversity and richness of expression.”
A 1847 daguerreotype portrays Keokuk, a chief of the Sac and Fox Nation, who sat for his portrait at the St. Louis studio of Thomas M. Easterly. Chief Keokuk, also known as Watchful Fox, holds a staff and wears a necklace made of grisly bear claws, and has a fierce, proud facial expression.
Portraiture also exposed aspects of American life that many people preferred to ignore. “The Scourged Back,” a photo taken during a medical examination around 1863 in Baton Rouge, La., depicts an enslaved person who escaped, and whose back is covered in a terrible array of whipping scars. The image, attributed to the photography studio McPherson & Oliver, was reproduced and circulated widely during the Civil War by Northern abolitionists, to illustrate the brutality of slavery and advocate for its end.
The exhibition also suggests that there is always room for social mobility, even in the face of racial barriers or economic disparities. Alongside 19th-century documentary images of anonymous urban street sweepers and newsboys are studio portraits, such as a Harlem man in a three piece tuxedo and bow tie, taken in 1938.
“It was affordable to have your portrait taken and to send it to other people,” said Rooseboom. “America is much bigger than any European country, so in order to be able to see the rest of the country, the people, landscape,” photography was “a very useful medium, from private portraiture to commercial images.”
Perich, of the Smithsonian, said that the range and diversity of pictures shared in the exhibition shows the full scope of photography’s power in American life.
“Photography is often seen as the most democratic of art forms,” she said. “There’s the reality and then there’s the dream, and photography helps us negotiate between the two.”
