The two women look out through an adjacent window in their brick apartment under a wind-waving American flag. One of their faces falls into the shadows, the other is obscure by stars and stripes.
This is a portrayal from the series “Americans” by Robert Frank, a photographer of the parade in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1955. The festival may be on the street below, but the photos seem to suggest, but the sense of enthusiasm and patriotism is lost in the mood of the darkness.
“American Photography” presents half a dozen black and white photographs of “Americans” in the first room at a vast new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Beautiful from life and home with time, sports illustrations.
The contrast is harsh. Frank's shot captured the isolation, longing and despair of American life. This is far from the bright pastels of optimistic, shiny covers.
The two Dutch co-curators of “American Photography” that will be held on Friday and will be held until June 9th, Matty Boom and Hansleuse Boom, who have American photography always have these two poles of American self-image He said it reflects: pastoral depictions and reality.
“The American Dream is largely shaped by photography,” says Taco Divitz, director of Riches Mutham at the National Museum of the Netherlands. It contrasts with European visual culture, he added. This is always based on art such as painting and etching. “In the United States, photography is not only released for use as an art form, but especially for use in everyday life,” he said.
Over 220 photos from the “American Photography” show, as you would expect, will not become the biggest hit album or the lookbook of the most famous photographers in the United States. The exhibition includes works by well-known artists such as Richard Avedon, Diane Albus, Nan Goldin and Robert Maplettopo, but these include unknown shutterbugs, photo booth strips, playing cards and catalogues. Pages from the catalog are scattered between the snapshots taken.
The show explores the various features of photography in American life, but landscapes for people to display family albums at home, use photos to attract clients, and seduce pioneers to the West I'm looking for how I sent the image. Between how America wants to see itself and how it really looks.
“One of the things that make this a historically distinctive study is the richness of photography and genres outside the realm of art,” says Shannon Pericci, photography curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Ta. For an exhibition.
The photograph depicts both optimism and the remains of the American dream. This is the idea that the boom has said since the term was coined in the 1930s. Initially it referred to the ideal “social order,” and then in the 1950s it was a desire for materialistic upward mobility. During the civil rights movement, it became a quest for racial equality, a boom was added, and then again bent towards personality.
Rijksmuseum began collecting American photos 17 years ago, and the current Trove contains 7,500 individual photos and 1,500 photo books. To further expand their options, the co-curators also made four trips to the United States, with public and private collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and St. Louis I washed it. Kansas City, Missouri Boom said it traveled as much as possible by bus or train to get views from the ground.
The curator visited eight times the photographs accumulated by New York collector Peter J. Cohen. For over 30 years, Peter J. Cohen has scrutinized flea markets, thrift stores, yard sales and eBay to buy images of unknown strangers. The Boom and Loose Boom have selected over 170 photos. This was donated by Cohen to the collection of Rijksmuseum.
“Of all the themes on the show, the American Dream is the easiest to portray in photographs,” Cohen said in a phone interview.
“Everyone loves taking photos in a new car,” he added. “Women are proudly posing in new hats and new dresses. There are plenty of photos of men displaying recently raised fish.”
But most of the time, Americans just want to see themselves. Portraits were one of the most popular photo formats, and Americans were adopted early in their return to the Daguerre Leotype, a photograph made from small silver copper plates. The American Daguerreotype, a self-portrait of photographer Henry Fitz Jr. in 1840, appears in “American Photography,” which was loaned out by the Smithsonian.
“A few months after they managed to paint humans, all sorts of studios in New York were already undefeated and were making commercial portraits,” Boom said. “In the beginning it was a white privilege, but later there was a studio in Harlem and a portrait of Native Americans. There was all this diversity and richness of expression.”
The 1847 Daguerreotype depicts Sac and the chief of Foxnation, Keokku, sitting in a portrait at Thomas M. Easterly's St. Louis studio. Chief Keokku, also known as Watchful Fox, has a staff member and wears a necklace made from grizzly bear claws, with a fiercely proud look.
The portrait also revealed aspects of American life that many people like to ignore. Photos taken during a medical check-up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana around 1863 depict a person who escaped and was enslaved, whose back was covered with severe whipping scars. Images attributed to MacPherson & Oliver in the photography studio were widely reproduced and spread during the Civil War, in order to explain the atrocities of slavery and defend its purpose.
The exhibition also suggests that there is always room for social mobility in the face of racial barriers and economic disparities. Along with 19th century documentary images of an anonymous city street sweeper and newsboy, there are studio portraits of a harem man in a three-piece tuxedo and bow tie, taken in 1938.
“It was affordable to take your portrait and send it to others,” Looseboom said. “As America is much larger than European countries, to allow us to see other parts of the country, people and landscapes,” the photographs are “very useful, from private portraits to commercial images. It was a medium.”
Perich, the Smithsonian, said the range and diversity of photographs shared at the exhibition indicate the full extent of the power of photography in American life.
“Photographers are often considered the most democratic art form,” she said. “There's reality, then there's dreams, and photography helps us negotiate between the two.”
