“The making of a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present,” was the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank’s deliberately loose statement of intent for his Guggenheim Fellowship application in 1954.
Frank was successful, and another four years later, having travelled more than 10,000 miles and shot in excess of 27,000 photographs, the first edition of The Americans was published. It did not sell particularly well, and its sharply observed critique of the flipside of the American Dream was not universally well received: the editors of Popular Photography described it as “a wart-covered picture” by “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption”. And yet it remains one of the most influential photographic works of the 20th century; a masterly sequence of 83 pictures that was shocking to some and thrilling to others in its bleak outlook, daring originality and, above all, its overt authorship.
Frank’s story is retold in the catalogue to American Photography, an expansive survey show at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. It comes as no surprise that his magnum opus will open the show, given the long shadow his book casts on photography in the US. However, the parallels that emerge between his journey and that of the curators, completed seven decades later, are as striking as they are unobvious.
Idiosyncratic snapshot
Besides opening with Frank’s book, along with eight photographs from the sequence, and a spattering of many of the usual suspects in the rooms that follow, American Photography will be surprisingly unstarry. Bold, artistic intent is just one of the impulses explored. Eight years in the making, the show’s curators travelled extensively around the US, visiting collections both obvious and obscure, determined to not just follow the canon but be led by their instincts and interests to dig up myriad ways that photography both infiltrated and reflected society.
A late-1960s curio box made of cigarette packets and portraits of roommates Photo: Andy Romer Photography, New York
Thus, American Photography will not so much be an exhibition of greatest hits from the country’s leading practitioners as an idiosyncratic exploration of “the place that the new medium assumed in American society and the diverse ways in which photographs have been produced and used”, according to its curators, Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom.
While the likes of Edward Weston, Walker Evans, William Klein and Nan Goldin are all represented, they will sit alongside dozens of advertisements, photo albums, record sleeves, product catalogues and all manner of surprising ephemera—from a handmade family curio to a postcard of 12,000 employees from the Ford Motor Company factory in Detroit, claimed to be the “Most Expensive Picture That Was Ever Taken” after the assembly line stopped for it to be made.
Boom and Rooseboom have worked together since the mid-1990s, building a photography collection for the museum, which came to the medium relatively late. Having focused especially on 19th-century France, they turned their attention to the US a decade ago, following a ten-year restoration of the Rijksmuseum that was completed in 2014 with the reopening of the Philips Wing and its first exhibition devoted to photography, Modern Times. This latest blockbuster is the result not just of eight years of research and travel, but also the museum’s wider collecting strategy.
Like Frank, they took on an enormous subject and edited down, from thousands of images that piqued their interests, to around 200 photographs. And their “broad, voluminous picture” of the US, to reuse Frank’s words, will be for many the surprise of the show, with its range and attention upon lesser known or anonymous sources, rather than an overarching “concept” or focus on auteurs.
“Photography and nation building were very much entangled,” Boom says. “For the United States, photography is the art, just as the paintings in the Rijksmuseum were the art of the 17th century [in the Netherlands]. American scholars have focused on the big oeuvres and, of course, the important photographers … For us, it’s interesting to look at the whole field—to look high and look at low—and put all these applications together.”
• American Photography, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 7 February-9 June
