The exhibition ties in with the focus on photography in recent years, with a particular emphasis on fashion and portrait photography. It invites visitors to explore the complexity of the photographic portraits in the museum's collection, from the early days to the present.

On the one hand, there are the representative portraits from the 1860s to the 1920s. They show people in the poses of their time. These self-portraits reveal the bourgeoisie's need for representation in images, as the leading social force of the time. These images are not only testimonies to individual identity, but also documents of social order, expressions of status and self-image. They thus also refer to the social context of their creation, which changed noticeably during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. Their value lies in their proximity to reality, in their claim to authenticity, in the character of the visible as evidence of what has been.

Portraits from later decades, from 1920 to the present day, unfold somewhat more freely, consciously taking the step into the artistic realm. Here, the face becomes a projection surface, the image an interpretation. With the emergence of new artistic trends and forms of expression, photography developed as an independent medium. Contrasts, form, light and composition break away from the purely documentary and open up aesthetic spaces in which proximity and detachment, intimacy and abstraction merge.

Curated by Regina Havekes-van Creij