Photographer Hendrik Kerstens’ daughter is wearing what appears to be a 17th-century headdress. It gives her portrait the look and feel of a Dutch master. In reality, the headdress is a napkin. The photo hangs in the Museum of the City of New York.

Hendrik Kerstens' work is part of Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered, an exhibition that opened this week featuring the work of 13 Dutch photographers. The exhibition marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Henry Hudson and the Dutch in New York.

Pit bull terriers
The exhibition is a co-production between the Museum of the City of New York and Amsterdam's FOAM Photography Museum. FOAM director Marloes Krijnen was in New York for the opening and says she could see “Vermeer’s light” in the photo series Charlotte Dumas made of pit bull terriers in an animal shelter in New York.

Her colleague Misha de Ridder referred to “Jacob van Ruisdael's light” in his dramatic view from the beach at Sandy Hook. Hendrik Kerstens says, "It was never my intention to imitate 17th-century painters, but perhaps because I am a Dutch person, it's in my DNA. I've certainly been influenced by Rembrandt; I've looked at his paintings so often. I love his work".

Indirectly, all three photographers explained what makes their contributions so Dutch. The curator of the exhibition is Cathy Ryan, photo editor of the New York Times Magazine, the newspaper’s glossy Sunday supplement. She also stressed the classical influence on much of the work she chose. "It’s a good time – exciting – for work by Dutch photographers. And that’s fed by a feeling for and an understanding of classical traditions. That's the basis, that's the beginning. But when you see how varied the work we’ve assembled here is, you can see that every photographer has given their own modern twist to that classical tradition."
 

Baseball cap
Almost all the photographers created new work for the exhibition and most of them travelled to New York to take their photos. However, Erwin Olaf's work was inspired at a distance by photos and other information about a black family dating from around 1910. Hendrik Kerstens daughter was unable to go to New York so he brought New York to her. Apart from the napkin from his favourite restaurant, he photographed her with a plastic supermarket bag as a headscarf and a New York Yankees baseball cap.
 

For the New York Times article, Kathy Ryan chose Misha de Ridder's turbulent seascape as the attention-grabbing photograph announcing the exhibition. She says, "It's such a wonderful photo, it brings tears to your eyes the first time you see it. It’s also a historic photo; it's probably one of the first impressions that Henry Hudson had when he landed here 400 years ago. Sandy Hook is probably the first piece of land he saw after crossing the Atlantic".
 

Marloes Krijnen says the exhibition is already a success. "Of course, it’s a good time to explore the relationship between the Netherlands and New York during the Hudson year, but what I find most interesting is that this is a moment of intense contact that produces something. There's been a lot of publicity for this exhibition and Dutch photographers are very visible in New York at the moment. A number of them have had new commissions and sold some work. It’s been productive".