Limitless Photography

Every time we visit Rotterdam we try to check out the latest cultural collections. The port city has a lot huge old style warehouses made vacant by the stacks of shipping containers on the docks.

Empty warehouses, like abandoned banks, make great music venues and museums. Yesterday, after we checked into our hotel, we took the subway to a stop that was a block away from the Netherlands Photography Museum. The exhibits were divvied up into four large floors. 

Flat country, vertical living. Everywhere we’ve stayed the first challenge is how to negotiate the stairway.

The first floor in the museum elaborated on the history of photography as it developed (how else?) in Europe and the Netherlands. 

There was a selection of portrait photography that was like an intimate fashion show.

For me the most arresting photograph was an unintentional Warhol-like strip of passport photos that even from a distance haunt the room.

As we went from floor-to-floor the photos began to be grouped according to theme. Athletic grace, romantic moments, the devastation of war, broken up into collages that mixed black-and-white with color.

On about the fourth floor experiments in the medium were divvied up.

My feeling at that point was that presentations, like the one concerning cyanotypes, would have benefited from less space. (Cyanotypes create deep blue images using light sensitive iron salts instead of silver-based chemicals.) 

The question the museum asks visitors as they enter is how do they approach the dilemma of selection? Everyone has a cell phone that can take incredible shots, so when contests are held and exhibitions take place at studios, how many should the museum choose each year, and what should be the criterion? There was a panel that was left blank to remind people of the countless photographs that aren’t exhibited and encourages them to give suggestions.

The museum made me wonder why we don’t have its equivalent in Albuquerque. The university has a small gallery that changes its display periodically, but given our history of photography in New Mexico, from Ansel Adams (and before) to Joel-Peter Witkin, I would think we could come up with a world class presentation in a great horizontal venue.