Jocelyn Lee in 200 Years of American Photography at Rijksmuseum
January 2, 2025
For American Photography, the Rijksmuseum has invited a selection of photographers from the United States to investigate what America is, not only in the present, but also what it has been in pivotal moments since the invention of photography itself. Captured through their lenses, events, individuals and movements of national importance are brought into focus.
Jocelyn Lee’s work is about the senses. When she takes a photograph, she waits for the moment when her subjects ‘breath their own life into the room’. The result is a series of portraits and landscapes that are both intimate and anonymous. Lee, who in 2001 received a Guggenheim Fellowship, is renowned for her focus on the textural richness of skin, fabrics, and foliage. Her fascination with the physical and psychological transitions of people has produced incisive portraits that capture the fraught passage from adolescence to adulthood, and the changes that aging registers on the body.
At American Photography, Lee’s portrait is part of a selection of 200 works which capture the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States. The exhibition presents the country as seen through the eyes of American photographers, and shows how photography as a medium became deeply rooted in American society.
Over the past decades, the Rijksmuseum has been assembling a collection of American photographic work. This is the first time the museum is exhibiting photographs from the collection, alongside loaned works from American, Dutch and other European collections. This show includes iconic photographs by Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus, Jocelyn Lee and James Van Der Zee, as well as surprising images by unknown and anonymous photographers.
The exhibition is curated by Hans Rooseboom and Mattie Boom, and on view from 7 February to 9 June, 2025.
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Image: Jocelyn Lee, Julia in Greenery, 2005, Archival pigment print, 61 x 50.8 cm, 101 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of FLAT // LAND Gallery Amsterdam.