The 20th Century is the age of photography,” says Mattie Boom, curator of photography at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “More than painting or sculpture, it is the century’s most influential art form by far. When the first Kodak camera was launched in 1888, it sold around 5,000 units. By the 1960s, Kodak was selling 70 million Instamatic cameras. So photography in the 20th Century was huge. And today we are drowning in an ocean of images.”

We are standing in the middle of Modern Times, a new exhibition charting the history of photography during the 20th Century. From the Rijksmuseum’s holdings of around 30,000 prints in this area, Boom and her co-curator Hans Rooseboom have selected 400 impressive photographs to lend coherent narrative shape to a vast and potentially sprawling subject.

“Now that we have some distance from it, we wanted to look anew at photography in the 20th Century,” explains Boom. “So this exhibition includes many applications of photography: record covers, postage stamps, books, magazines – the whole scope. Photography explodes in the 20th Century – and it also rises as a form of art.”

The exhibition, which is divided into themes such as amateur photography, the rise of photojournalism, war reportage, experimentation, and commercial work, contains pictures by many established masters of the medium, including Brassaï, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and William Klein. Here is my selection of five standout images that represent important aspects of the show.
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美しい仏さまには感嘆
The law will now come into force
一棵棵楊樹圍起和構成的村莊
那襲緋紅的裙裾在風中飛舞輕揚
一人，一茶一世界
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黑色的短劍冒著寒光