Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic You know America has arrived at the Rijksmuseum the moment you enter the wide green expanse of Museumplein: looking down from a billboard on the building\u2019s elaborate neogothic facade, a pair of gigantic eyes are watching you, glaring from mirror lenses with a persistent stare. Vastly enlarged, \u201cAmerica Seen Through Stars and Stripes\u201d, Ming Smith\u2019s portrait of a coolly indifferent Black man in reflective shades, head silhouetted against a United States flag, framed by a mesh of white bars, unnerves and intrigues. It recalls Dr Eckleburg\u2019s all-seeing eyes gazing in judgment from a hoarding in The Great Gatsby.Half documentary, half surreal, Smith\u2019s 1976 New York picture introduces the Rijksmuseum\u2019s exceptional, unexpected and utterly engrossing exhibition American Photography, a tale of glamour and violence, greed and tenderness, as evocative as Gatsby.It spans nearly three centuries and a kaleidoscope of faces and places, the communal \u2014 an anonymous Kansas daguerreotype \u201cBoys Playing Marbles\u201d, 1850; a postcard featuring \u201c12,000 Employees of the Ford Motor Company, Detroit\u201d outside their factory, 1913 \u2014 starring alongside individuals forlorn or devastated. Saul Leiter\u2019s lone figure on the kerbside, \u201cStreet Scene\u201d (1947), is alienated, mysterious, beautiful. Nina Berman\u2019s \u201cMarine Wedding\u201d chronicles the marriage in 2006 of mutilated Iraq War veteran Tyler Ziegel, a plastic dome replacing his broken skull, and his childhood sweetheart Renee Kline. The bride appears grief-stricken, the couple divorced within a year and Ziegel died at 30 from an overdose.The first such major survey in a European museum, American Photography, drawn from the Rijksmuseum\u2019s eclectic collection plus well-targeted loans, is timely, launched as Europe struggles to understand Trumpian America. Installed thematically \u2014 \u201cFace to Face\u201d, \u201cAt Home\u201d, \u201cOn the Road\u201d, \u201cSelling Points\u201d, \u201cDeath and Disaster\u201d \u2014 it records how the camera has eyed the country in reportage, advertisements, protest posters, family and amateur snapshots, photo-booth strips, memorabilia.Throughout, the Stars and Stripes performs as a chorus of hope and despair: on a cigarette packet promoting Dwight Eisenhower (\u201cI like Ike\u201d); constructed from red-, white- and blue-tipped matches, one aflame, the whole edifice a flimsy balancing act, in Bill Stettner\u2019s \u201cStars and Stripes Forever?\u201d; in tatters in Louis Lo Monaco\u2019s collage prints for Washington\u2019s \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d march.In the opening display, the flag billows gloomily against a brick wall and window, obscuring the woman watching a city pageant in Robert Frank\u2019s \u201cParade \u2014 Hoboken, New Jersey\u201d. Frank\u2019s grainy, low-lit, cropped critiques \u2014 \u201cTrolley \u2014 New Orleans\u201d shows rows of eager passengers glancing from bus windows, the Black travellers bunched at the back \u2014 were published in The Americans in 1960, to vitriolic reviews. Classics of American discontent, his monochromes here face a wall of contemporaneous glossy magazine covers, House Beautiful, Seventeen, McCall\u2019s, where material girls breezily equate stuff \u2014 hats, lipstick, cars \u2014 with happiness and success.\u00a0\u201cThe American dream,\u201d says Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits, \u201cis shaped by photography.\u201d Even mid-Depression, studio images such as James van der Zee\u2019s retouched photographs brought Hollywood panache to Harlem, for example a crystalline, confident \u201cPortrait of an Unknown Man\u201d, still enjoying the limelight despite being nameless.Postwar, a plethora of amateur snaps, now faded and precious, self-staged the dream. The Black mother and her children, trustingly smiling, dressed to the nines in fur and jaunty caps \u2014 the little boy in a coat surely bought too big in order to last \u2014 pose with the flair of professional models in \u201cFamily Standing Beside Their Cadillac, Baltimore\u201d (1962). More than any advertisement, that intimate trio driving out one sunny winter morning captures aspirations for the good life.Yet you fear for these children: metres away in Jack Jenkins\u2019 \u201cElizabeth Eckford Arriving at Little Rock Central High School\u201d (1957), a Black girl stands proud while hostile screaming white women stalk her path into a just-desegregated classroom. Such faultlines of race and class, war and peace, man versus nature, recur: photography\u2019s inevitable subjects as it developed in parallel with American history.The earliest image, \u201cSelf-Portrait\u201d (1840), is an experimental daguerreotype for which telescope manufacturer Henry Fitz shut his eyes to the light for several minutes. The technique quickly caught on: in Missouri, Thomas Easterly depicted \u201cChief Keokuk\u201d, wizened and imposing in his bear-claw necklace, in 1847, and charismatic Black barber Robert Wilkinson, acclaimed among \u201cthe Coloured Aristocracy of St Louis\u201d in 1858. A photograph of a whipped enslaved person, \u201cThe Scourged Back, Baton Rouge, Louisiana\u201d, was an abolitionist carte de visite in 1863. A miniature portrait, \u201cUnion Soldier\u201d (1864), was worn on the inside of a gold brooch, next to the heart. Aesthetics, emotional appeal and social issues became inseparable; photography entered everyday existence.The exquisite \u201cFrost on a Window, Boston\u201d (1850) memorialises fleeting quotidian splendour \u2014 Walt Whitman\u2019s transcendentalist Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855 \u2014 and anticipates self-conscious art photography. It hangs with Paul Strand\u2019s shadow patterns \u201cFrom the Viaduct, 125th Street, New York\u201d (1916) and Aaron Siskind\u2019s \u201cAbstract\u201d (1948), garbage photographed close up to resemble blots and swirls in abstract expressionist painting.\u00a0Photography took a century to be considered art. It happened first in 20th-century America because \u2014 and this capitalist imperative dominates the entire show \u2014 competition, in a nation insatiably consuming advertising and entertainment images, had long forced commercial photographers to be inventive and original. Seldom shown in museums, their avant garde credentials here are revelatory.A young man\u2019s laughing face fractured by thick black lines, suggesting a playful cubist Picasso, is \u201cI\u2019m all cut up\u201d, an advertisement for Kahn Brothers tailors, Kentucky, in 1911. Schadde Brothers\u2019 1915 display sample of sweets, hand-painted in colour, is a vision of plenty arranged as a modernist grid \u2014 geometric abstraction seductive and shaped to sell. Exploiting the look half a century later, Andy Warhol launched pop art.Even the American sublime turns out to have its entrepreneurial twin. Carleton Watkins\u2019 \u201cCathedral Rock, Yosemite\u201d (1861), a stark monochrome \u2014 monumental, bare, made with the laborious wet-plate method \u2014 appeals as a celebration of nature pristine and untouched. But Watkins composed as reverent an image of destruction: graceful, symmetrical arches of water jets in \u201cHydraulic Mining, Malakoff Diggins\u201d, eroding mountains to find gold in Sierra Nevada, photographed to attract investors.Although some famous artists are here, their works are mostly repurposed or atypical: Walker Evans\u2019 provincial main street \u201cCounty Seat of Hale County, Alabama\u201d as wartime propaganda; Ansel Adams\u2019 grand sequoias reproduced minutely on an Ahwahnee Hotel menu-card; Irving Penn\u2019s battered workman\u2019s \u201cMud Glove\u201d, as crisply detailed as his fashion prints. The show\u2019s real achievement is highlighting the unknown and thus surprising us still with America\u2019s immense diversity, contradictions, fragility.Like Golden Age paintings in 17th-century Holland, photography \u2014 democratic, widely accessible, fast, innovative \u2014 created American identity. The Rijksmuseum\u2019s generous, far-ranging exhibition expresses that open spirit.To June 9, rijksmuseum.nlFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic You know America has arrived at the Rijksmuseum the moment you enter the wide green expanse of Museumplein: looking down from a billboard on the building\u2019s elaborate neogothic facade, a pair of gigantic eyes are watching you, glaring from mirror lenses with a persistent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-225761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225763,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225761\/revisions\/225763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}