From the 1840s selfie to the 60s ads: Eight images that tell the story of America

A new exhibition, featuring more than 200 photographs, charts 300 years of image-making in the United States, showing how the country's history and photography have run in parallel.

By: Deborah Nicholls-Lee / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

In 1840, using a copper plate he created himself, Henry Fitz Jr. produced one of the world’s first selfies—with his eyes closed, to avoid any glances that might spoil the result. By creating this stunning blue-toned image, he wasn’t just recording his own appearance; he was also documenting America’s first steps in an art form that would tell its history in entirely new ways.

Fitz's self-portrait, along with more than 200 other photographs, chronicles 300 years of image-making in the newest exhibition at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, American photography [American Photography], which is also the first comprehensive study in Europe on the subject. Complemented by international loans, the exhibition presents for the first time the museum's own collection of American images, which it has been expanding since 2007.

For co-curators Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, the exhibition's starting point was to show the US through the different perspectives of its photographers. "Americans were using this medium the way we [the Dutch] used painting in the 17th century," Boom tells us. with the BBC"America and photography go hand in hand. This medium is very connected to the country."

The exhibition has deliberately strayed from a “top 100” approach, adds Rooseboom, saying: “That would have been too easy.” Instead, works by icons like Robert Frank, Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus are placed alongside older moments, postcards and advertisements – “surprisingly good images that nobody knows about,” he says.

A 19th-century ferrotype photograph of a man and a woman in front of a simple barn is a clear example of this. The image was likely sold immediately by a traveling photographer, “for a modest price,” explains Rooseboom. “Many people had just arrived and were living in the countryside, far from the big cities, so this was the only opportunity they had to have a portrait taken.” The man stands proudly, looking straight into the camera, but the woman keeps her head down and looks away. “Sometimes you can feel that people are just not used to being photographed,” says Rooseboom. “Today we see in magazines and films how to pose elegantly.” This may have been the only time in their lives that they were photographed, and the result, adds Boom, “would hang on the wall of their house forever.”

In stark contrast to the previous image, a 1913 postcard depicting 12 Ford Motor Company employees in Detroit may have been “the most expensive photograph ever taken,” according to a newspaper of the time, after the factory was forced to shut down for two hours to gather staff. The company boasted that it was “the largest group photograph ever taken,” showing that the industry was beginning to understand the value of investing heavily in promotional photography. Taken the year Ford introduced the first moving assembly line in America, this photograph also illustrates the moment when the United States became the world’s largest economy and shows the mass production that shaped the country.

The image’s reappearance in Ford marketing also made it one of the first examples of photomontage. As the same nuanced faces filled the front of the photograph, the number of employees mentioned in the caption grew exponentially, while a building on the left was removed in one version and gained additional floors in another. “It seems that many photographers and their publishers had no qualms about abandoning their medium’s potential for realism,” Boom and Rooseboom write in the exhibition catalogue.

A decade later, New York portrait photographer James Van Der Zee was also embellishing his work, drawing jewels on his subjects and retouching their faces to erase dark lines and wrinkles. “I put my heart and soul into them and tried to make each photo look more beautiful than the person,” he said. As a black photographer working from his studio in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, his work documents a period when black migrants fleeing the segregation of the South were building new lives in the urban North. For the first time, African-Americans and other minority groups could be photographed by someone within their own community and represented in a way that uplifted them. Portrait of an unknown man (1938), for example, is carefully composed to suggest self-confidence. The dress is elegant, and the flower in the jacket pocket adds a bohemian touch. This image reflects the aspirations and increased willingness to act of the African-American population and Van Der Zee's pride in his culture.

The Chinese-American community is at the heart of the work of Irene Poon, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents, first-generation immigrants from Guangzhou, ran an herbal medicine store. An image from 1965 shows her sister, Virginia, in a local candy store, surrounded by Hershey’s and Nestlé chocolates. The letters “Nest” partially protrude from the densely packed shelves, reinforcing the sense that she is enclosed within this multitude of letters. Next to her head, a chocolate bar labeled “Look” demands attention, hinting at another role for American photography: advertising, a sector in which the United States was a pioneer. “A lot of XNUMXth-century artists got their start in advertising. It’s part of the history of art,” Boom says. “This whole field was already there, and art, and photography as an art form, feeds off of it.”

One of the most powerful images of the exhibition, The American flag, forever? (1970) was created by New York advertising photographer Bill Stettner, who aimed to elevate the status of commercial photography and successfully lobbied for photographers to retain the rights to their work. “I’d like to think that what I’m doing, which is clearly commercial photography, for advertising, is art,” he told an interviewer for the 1980s television series, The world of photography [World of Photography].

The American flag, forever?, his best-known work, was originally just a sample, created, as he put it, “out of necessity” to shore up his portfolio after a financial crisis. The work takes its name from the patriotic march and depicts the American flag, made of matchsticks just catching fire, perhaps suggesting the fragility of the United States and the principles on which it was founded. “Commercial photography is often overlooked and not collected by museums, but it is a visually fascinating field,” says Rooseboom. “It finds its precursors to modernism in advertising, but almost no one knows this and almost no one has collected it or exhibited it in galleries.”

In the years following World War II, mass immigration to the United States brought new ways of thinking. The United States took over as the cultural leader, replacing Europe, and photography was finally accepted as an art form. More interesting approaches to photography emerged, going beyond documenting people and places, aiming to provoke emotions and ask profound questions. America, according to the American flag (1976) by Ming Smith, created on the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, returns once again to the American flag, inviting the country to reflect on its history. By placing a figure in sunglasses in front of a reflection in a store window, she created a confusing web of reflections. The grid structure suggests imprisonment, but – combined with the round glasses and stars on the flag – it also creates an abstract composition reminiscent of modern art. “She is a careful observer, playing with all these layers within the image,” says Boom.

Smith explores the artistic potential of photography, experimenting with double exposure, shutter speed, and collage. In one version of this image, she draws thick red lines over it, transforming this moment in the United States with marks that resemble blood or flames. Smith’s work draws on the civil rights movement that included figures such as James Baldwin and Alvin Ailey. She was the first woman to join the African-American photography collective known as the Camoinge Workshop, and the first woman of color to have her work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). However, the demographic she represented was largely ignored by the art world. “I worked to capture black culture, its richness, its love. That was my drive,” she told Financial Times-it in 2019. "It wasn't that I was going to make money from it, or fame – or love, because there weren't even any exhibitions."

The political power of photography is also seen in the work of Native American (Seminole-Muscogee-Navajo) photographer Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, who uses the camera to correct misconceptions about indigenous peoples and offer an alternative perspective on U.S. history. “It is no longer a stranger holding a camera and looking at us, but grasped by brown hands that open up known worlds,” she wrote in a 1993 essay. “We document ourselves with humanizing eyes, we create new visions with ease, and we can turn the camera to show you how we see you.”

Through its title, It's not an advertisement, it's my homeland., based on a tourist image of Monument Valley in Arizona, she highlights the commercialization of American land and uses what she calls “photographic sovereignty” to take us back to the beginnings of history and tell it from a new perspective. In combination with work like Tonopah, Nevada (2012) by Bryan Schutmaat, which documents the impact of the mining industry on the landscape of the American West, images like Tsinhnahjinnie tell a story of a beautiful land that has different meanings for different people: financial gain, security or a sacred space. As the camera has changed hands, American stories have multiplied. “American photography is a much richer and broader field than we even knew,” says Rooseboom. “There’s still so much to discover.” /Telegraph/