I wasn’t expecting to get emotional looking at a nude at 11am on a Wednesday morning. Especially not a nude taken in 1908. But there I was, on the first floor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, standing in front of Katharina Behrend’s self-portrait, and tears started welling up in my eyes. I was experiencing that feeling you sometimes get from viewing a certain expression in a photograph or reading a particular sentence in a diary when it hits you that the people in the past weren’t just serious-set faces living in black and white, speaking in formal iambic pentameter, but just the same as you and I. And for a moment, you transcend time, the years collapse like an accordion, and you occupy a singular space with this long-gone soul. 

On this occasion, the feeling arose because, just the night before, I’d taken an almost identical photograph to Behrend’s in the bathroom of my hotel room, as one is sometimes tempted to do in these situations. Looking at this nude selfie, reminded me vividly of my own, I felt fierce kinship with the artist and she became as alive to me as any of the visitors physically there in the room. Overwhelmed by the intensity of this feeling, the tears began to pool.

Time, as a concept and as a reality, is everywhere you look at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, which has reopened its doors this month in a newly renovated space on Rotterdam’s harbourside. The building – originally a warehouse for imported coffee from Brazil – was one of the few buildings in Rotterdam to survive the Second World War. In 2023, it was acquired as a donation by the Fotomuseum. Now, after a massive restoration project, it is finally ready for the public and combines exhibition, restoration and archives spaces, a darkroom and artists’ residences.

With a collection of more than 6.5 million objects, the museum holds one of the largest photography collections in the world. What’s unique about the space is that the archive depot and restoration ateliers are as much a part of the viewing experience as the exhibitions, with large windows offering the chance for visitors to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into previously unseen areas, like the restoration workshops where conservators in gloves can be spotted hunched over light tables studying time-damaged negatives.

As for the exhibitions themselves, the museum houses the Gallery of Honour of Dutch Photography, a permanent display of 99 images which traces the development of photography in the Netherlands, from the invention of the medium around to the current digital age. Here, Viviane Sassen’s images sit alongside those by Anton Corbijn and Cas Oorthuys. Photographs of cultural figures like Tupac Shakur and JFK occupy the same space as images from the Netherlands’ former colonies, including the court of the sultan of Yogyakarta or Augusta Curiel’s documentation of Suriname. The crowd at a Feyenoord-Ajax match sit next to passport photos of Anne Frank, next to a scene from post-coup Chile and, of course, Behrend’s tear-inducing self-portrait. It’s a vibrant and diverse collection that brings history to vivid life. And, while I didn’t personally see any of the other journalists at the press preview crying over the exhibition, I assume they were all equally (if slightly more stoically) as moved as me. 

The museum also opens with two temporary exhibitions. Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – Now is a show dedicated to the city, tracing its history and changing landscape through more than 300 images taken by both professional and amateur photographers. Awakening in Blue: An Ode to Cyanotype, meanwhile, celebrates the beauty of one of the oldest photographic techniques. Instantly recognisable by its deep-blue shade, cyanotypes are created through a slow process requiring only four elements – iron salts, water, light and a surface – and no lens, meaning nature and time become co-creators of the image with the artist.

Alongside early examples by cyanotype pioneer Anna Atkins, the exhibition features work by 15 contemporary artists who have combined this 19th-century technique with new media and materials to explore themes of ecology, the colonial past and the body as an archive. Suzette Bousema makes imprints of washed-up plastic, “future fossils”, while Sarojini Lewis uses the medium to challenge and retell colonial stories, exploring the scars of abandoned plantations in Suriname from feminist perspectives.

An embroidered textile piece by artist Marijn Kuijper, titled Under No Circumstances, questions a Dutch law which, until 2014, banned anyone who changed their gender from having children through sterilisation. The tapestry, which combines quotations from the legislation with cyanotypes of Kuijper with their child, is displayed next to a video project that brings together family footage and journal excerpts to explore the identity of being a parent, lover, and queer and trans person. Captivated by the story unfolding in front of me, it was only after several minutes that I realised a photographer, there to snap images of the occasion, was snapping several of me watching the film with, of course, eyes filled with tears.

Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – Now is running at The Nederlands Fotomuseum until 24 May, 2026.Awakening in Blue: An Ode to Cyanotype is running until 7 June 2026.