Photography
A vast photographic collection spanning the medium's entire history — early salt prints, albumen photographs of 19th-century Amsterdam, cartes-de-visite, the Dutch colonial archive, and modern photographic art.
The Netherlands, photographed from the inside.
hotography reached the Dutch early, and they turned it on themselves — the canals of nineteenth-century Amsterdam, the streets of a modernizing nation, and, more uncomfortably, the colonies the camera was used to survey and possess.
Ed van der Elsken roamed postwar Amsterdam with a camera the way a diarist keeps a notebook — restless, intimate, up close. Behind him stand the stiff albumen views of the nineteenth-century city. Together they make a national self-portrait in silver and gelatin: affectionate, candid, and not always flattering.