These photographs explore what it means to be American

Everyone has an opinion on America. Whether they love it, loathe it or claim indifference, the United States is impossible to ignore. For non-Americans, it is a cultural and political spectacle, a nation so vast and contradictory that it seems unknowable. In the UK, especially since Donald Trump took office in 2017, it has become common to mock America (and Americans) as a naive, young country that does not know itself. But this condescension is nothing new. In his 1962 travelogue Travels with Charley, American writer John Steinbeck observed Europe’s fixation with defining Americans: “In Europe, it’s a popular sport to describe what Americans are like. Everyone seems to know”.

Yet the Rijksmuseum’s American Photography exhibition in Amsterdam is not in the business of telling us what America is or isn’t. “Our starting point was to show the United States as seen through the eyes of American photographers,” explains curator Hans Rooseboom. “The exhibition is not so much a history lesson that’s merely illustrated with photographs. It’s really about photography, how it developed, and how American photographers have shown the country as they saw it, whether to highlight something, document it or simply share how it looks.”

The Rijksmuseum’s American Photography exhibition, featuring work by Nan Goldin, Carrie Mae Weems, Diane Arbus, Sally Mann and many more photographers, both known and unknown – spans over 75 years and took seven years to come together. Its timing could not be more fitting. Offering a view of America through the eyes of both its own artists and outsiders like Robert Frank, it presents a perspective on a nation that Trump now claims is in its “golden age”. Rooseboom and his team could never have predicted the timing, but the events of the past few weeks following Trump’s inauguration, unfolding just as the exhibition was being finalised, have reinforced a familiar truth: that history is always repeating itself. “In the exhibition, we have this postcard from the 1950s. I bought more some years ago because I was intrigued by the fact that there was apparently a genre, oil fields in Oklahoma and Texas, with proud text on it: ‘The Oil Capital of the World,’” he explains. “We wanted to use it in the exhibition as a historical phenomenon. But after Trump reaffirmed his commitment to boosting domestic oil production at his inauguration with the slogan ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ this old postcard, meant simply as a historical reference, suddenly became strikingly relevant again, without us knowing or intending it.”

While the exhibition showcases the iconic work of Goldin, documenting the life of her friend Cookie Mueller, and Frank’s renowned series The Americans, which exposes the stark realities beneath the glossy facade of magazine portrayals of American life, its most striking moments come from the works of those whose names are unfamiliar or unknown. When you enter the exhibition, you are not greeted by a headline name but by something far more intimate – a small photo box crafted from cigarette packets. Each of its four sides holds a portrait of a young Black person from the 60s, their expressions frozen in time. Inside each image is a handwritten letter addressed to the person who once owned the box. Known as a ‘lucky box,’ it is a container of shared joys and sorrows, believed to have been made by four roommates as a parting gift when they moved out of their home. It is the only object in the room. Emotive and deeply personal, it is a quiet yet powerful testament to friendship. Standing before it, you can’t help but wonder: did they leave because university was over? Or because the world, which values marriage and nuclear families over friendship, pulled them apart?

“We set ourselves the goal of finding and displaying lesser-known photographs by unknown makers and seeing if it works,” Rooseboom says as he takes me through the exhibition. “We really wanted to find unknown and unusual works that have been overlooked. Something fresh and new, both to us and to the audience. Hopefully, it offers another perspective on how photography has been used to tell stories, capture histories or reveal how things have unfolded.”

While American Photography highlights anonymous works, it also challenges myths about America, though not intentionally (the exhibition is not a history lesson, after all). The depiction of Indigenous Americans plays a central role, pushing back against the persistent narrative that America is a “young nation”, a framing that erases the deep, complex histories and cultures of Indigenous peoples long before European colonisation. The exhibition features portraits of Indigenous people dressed in European clothing, souvenir playing cards made for Europeans that depict Indigenous Americans (some of which are so deeply disrespectful that they are displayed face-down) and striking images of landscapes.

Among them is Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s powerful photograph of the iconic red mountains in the American Southwest, a landscape often used in advertising to evoke nostalgia for a romanticised, untamed America. But Tsinhnahjinnie subverts this commercialised gaze with a bold statement printed in black and green lettering across the image: ‘This is not a commercial, this is my Homeland’. “Unfortunately, photography has only been around since 1839, so we cannot reach too far back,” Rooseboom remarks. “It’s beyond our reach to tell that entire story, but we try to show parts of what has happened to people or to the country through photographs. We try to do justice to the history of photography, and inevitably, you get a sense of what the country was all about in that small moment in time.”

There is so much to see in this exhibition: from portraits of Americans and their guns, advertisements from the 50s, vinyls with portraits of Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and John Coltrane to family photographs, scrapbooks and more. Through the lenses of those who call it home and those who have observed it from within, American Photography reveals a nation in flux, shaped by contradiction, myth and reality. It offers no easy narratives or sweeping judgments, nor does it attempt to resolve America’s complexities. Instead, it assembles intimate, political and everyday moments that, together, form a mosaic of a country constantly reinventing itself. These images do not tell us what America is. They show us what it has been, what it could be and how it sees itself.

American Photography – America through Photographers’ Eyes by Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam until 9 June 2025.