An 1840 selfie to 1960s advertising: Eight images that tell the story of America
Deborah Nicholls-Lee
Bill Stettner (Credit: Bill Stettner)
A new exhibition of more than 200 photographs charts 300 years of image-making in the US, showing how the country's history and photography have run in parallel.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
One
of the exhibition's most powerful images, Stars and Stripes Forever?
(1970) was created by New York advertising photographer Bill Stettner,
who sought to elevate the status of commercial photography, and
successfully campaigned 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 an art," he told an interviewer for the 1980s television series World of Photography.
Stars and Stripes Forever?, his best-known work, was originally just a sample, made, he said,
"out of necessity" to boost his portfolio following a financial
downturn.
The work takes its name from a patriotic march and features a
US flag made from matches that has just caught fire, suggesting,
perhaps, the fragility of the US and the principles that founded it.
"Commercial photography is very often overlooked and not collected by
museums, but it's a fascinating field pictorially," says Rooseboom.
"You
find the precursors of Modernism in advertising, but hardly anyone
knows about this and [hardly anyone] has been collecting it or showing
it in exhibitions."
American Photography is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam until 9 June 2025. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue American Photography – America through Photographers' Eyes, by Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom.
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