Fashion
The American Dream, Through Foreign Eyes
A major Dutch museum is staging a huge exhibition of American photography that explores the tension between how the United States would like to see itself, and how it really looks.
Two women look out from adjacent windows of a brick apartment building, beneath an American flag that ripples in the wind. One of their faces falls in shadow, and the other is obscured by the stars and stripes.
This is photographer Robert Frank’s depiction of a parade in Hoboken, N.J., in 1955, from his series “The Americans.” The festivities may be on the street below, the photo seems to suggest, but the enthusiasm, or any sense of patriotism, is lost in a mood of gloom.
In “American Photography,” a vast new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a half dozen black-and-white photos from “The Americans” are displayed in the first room, on a wall opposite an array of colorful magazine pages from the same time, from Sports Illustrated, Life and House Beautiful.
The contrast is stark: Frank’s shots captured the isolation, yearning, and despair of American life — a far cry from the bright pastels on the optimistic, glossy covers.
Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, the two Dutch co-curators of “American Photography,” which opens Friday and runs through June 9, said that American photography has always reflected these two poles of the American self-image: an idyllic depiction and the reality.
