A museum just opened in Rotterdam with millions of photographs and it shows you how they survive

On the second and third floors of the Nederlands Fotomuseum, visitors don’t encounter photographs first. They encounter work. Behind glass walls, conservators in blue gloves lean over light tables, archivists slide grey boxes in and out of compact shelving, researchers move between drawers and monitors with the quiet focus of people who know that touching an image is always a risk.

The museum’s collection — more than 6.5 million objects — is not hidden in a basement or outsourced to a distant storage facility; it is staged as the institution’s beating heart. As Head of Collections Martijn van den Broek put it during the opening, the aim is to show that “photography is not just images on the wall, but vulnerable heritage that requires care.”

The effect is part laboratory, part theatre. Visitors walk past these spaces slowly, instinctively lowering their voices, aware that they are looking at a form of work usually kept out of sight. It’s a choreography of transparency that inevitably recalls the nearby Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the public art-storage building designed by MVRDV. But here the stakes feel different. 

What’s on display is not a parade of recognizable masterpieces, but the fragile infrastructure of photography: contact sheets with greasy fingerprints, curling vintage prints, glass negatives that look like they might crack under a wrong breath. Van den Broek admitted that staff are only beginning to adjust to working in a space that will soon be constantly observed. The museum is still new; the glass has not yet fully become routine. Preservation itself is turning into part of the visitor experience.

Martijn van den Broek, collections manager

That move makes sense in Rotterdam, a city that treats architecture as a public experiment. If Amsterdam remains the Netherlands’ symbolic first city, Rotterdam defines itself through reinvention and a kind of productive rivalry — less postcard, more prototype. Here, exposing structure and process is almost a civic habit. The Fotomuseum extends that logic inward, turning cultural infrastructure into architecture and museum work into something closer to an urban performance.

Only after this encounter with the living archive does the scale of the building fully register. The museum occupies the former Santos warehouse, built in 1901–1902 as a storage facility for coffee arriving from Brazil. Interim director Roderick van der Lee described it as “an icon” now given “a second life,” “a place where history, research and public experience come together.” The building once stabilized global trade; today it stabilizes visual memory. Walking through it, you feel that continuity. The floors are wide and muscular, the columns thick, the proportions those of a space designed for stacking, not contemplation. Its recent transformation wasn’t the first attempt to repurpose the site. For years it was slated to become the Rotterdam branch of a Hamburg-based design department store — a temple of curated consumption. That retail future never materialized, but it lingers as a telling counterfactual. Instead of circulating consumer goods, the building now circulates images — shifting the emphasis from lifestyle spectacle to cultural infrastructure.

The renovation and expansion were led by Renner Hainke Wirth Zirn Architekten with WDJArchitecten. Their intervention works through contrast rather than erasure: a new central atrium pulls daylight deep into the once introverted warehouse, while bridges and staircases create a vertical theatre of movement. You are constantly aware of other bodies moving above and below you. The building alternates between expansive, vertiginous spaces and compressed, quieter rooms, a rhythm that feels almost didactic. From certain landings, you can look down through the atrium and watch visitors circulate like figures in a sectional drawing; from below, the same void pulls the eye upward, producing a small but persistent dizziness.

On the first floor, the architects created what they call a “more intimate space.” After the infrastructural drama upstairs, this feels almost like a release. Here the Gallery of Honour of Dutch Photography presents 99 images spanning the history of the medium in the Netherlands, from canonical modernist bodies to pop-cultural portraits of figures like Snoop Dogg and Nick Cave. Head of Presentation Grace Wong-Sigui described them as works that tell “the story of artistic and social effects.” The room is scaled to the body, the light softer, the pace slower. Beauty returns — but it returns changed, framed by the knowledge that every image here survived a long chain of decisions, hands and climates. Historical cameras punctuate the displays, grounding the images in the devices that produced them. Photography is framed not only as vision, but as machinery, ergonomics, weight.

At ground level, the museum shifts tone again. The entrance floor functions as a public “living room for photography.” A major specialist library invites long stays, the kind of place where you could lose an afternoon in photobooks. The café and bookshop encourage lingering. Tucked into the space is an analog photoautomat — the cult black-and-white booth familiar to anyone who’s lived in Berlin long enough to care. Its presence is more than nostalgic. It proposes photography as an everyday ritual, not only as museum object. The museum’s emphasis on process doesn’t stop at observation. In the basement, education studios include a functioning darkroom where visitors — especially younger ones — can experiment with analogue techniques, from pinhole cameras to traditional photo prints. It’s a quiet but radical gesture: photography here is not only something to look at or preserve, but something to do. After seeing the systems that keep images alive upstairs, visitors are invited to step into the chain themselves, moving from passive spectators to active participants in the medium’s ongoing life.

Above, a rooftop addition contains a restaurant and short-stay apartments — a remnant of the building’s earlier retail ambitions, and a very Rotterdam way of layering functions.

The temporary exhibitions upstairs read less as centrepieces than as signals of direction. That direction is institutional. Van der Lee described the move as “a huge step forward” for the museum’s international position. Incoming director Zippora Elders spoke of building a program that is “more internationally grounded” while connecting Dutch photography to wider debates. Yet the fact that the Netherlands holds one of the world’s largest museum photography collections is not self-evident. Abundance reflects historical conditions: a country long embedded in global trade, science and colonial administration, where photography served as a tool of documentation and control. The density of images preserved here is not just a triumph of care; it is also a trace of power.

Seen this way, the visible archive carries a double meaning. Behind glass, photographs are cooled, stabilized and catalogued — but they also embody asymmetries of power: who produced images, who was seen, who was not. Transparency reveals labor, but it also exposes the skeleton of a national gaze.

The warehouse once buffered the uncertainties of global trade. Today, it performs a similar function for images. Photographs pass through climate systems and cataloguing protocols before re-emerging as heritage, art or evidence. The process is technically impressive — and never neutral. By placing those mechanisms at the centre of the visitor experience, the Nederlands Fotomuseum shifts attention away from the authority of the single image toward the infrastructures that give images their status. In Santos, photography is revealed as infrastructure — physical, cultural and political all at once.

Opening image: Nederlands Fotomuseum - front view © Photo Studio Hans Wilschut