An exterior view of the Nederlands Fotomuseum. © Iwan Baan

The Nederlands Fotomuseum—the country’s national museum of photography—reopens this week in a renovated warehouse in Rotterdam’s harbor, located on the south bank of the River Maas. The repurposed six-story cast-iron column structure was built at the turn of the 20th Century and originally used to store coffee shipped from Brazil but stood empty for many years before being registered as a national monument. The museum, founded in 2003, acquired the building in 2023 through a private donor, though it also received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Municipality of Rotterdam.

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Without minimizing the contemporary reality of photographic dematerialization, the museum’s intention is to show the history of photography in its objecthood. What is a photography museum’s responsibility in the uncertain age of A.I.? Here, it is still deeply tied to an analog history that is worth celebrating: it’s a “heritage that requires care and knowledge,” Martijn van den Broek, head of collections, who has been with the museum for 25 years, told Observer.

The newly rehabilitated structure houses one of the largest museum collections of photography in the world, as well as accoutrements such as vintage cameras, guidebooks, negatives, slides and prints. Across the second and third floors, climate-controlled facilities house the museum’s collection and its digitization and conservation hubs. These spaces are public-facing, with windows that offer visitors a look at the fragile processes happening there. It’s a much more modest mise-en-scène relative to the neighboring Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which opened its stored collection to visitors in 2021.

© Observer