12/11/2012

Foam Museum on the Keizersgracht has a lot more to offer than initially meets the eye. It’s not only a photography museum showcasing world-famous photographers, along with young and undiscovered talent, it also offers rental space for meetings, dinners and events, has numerous galleries where various exhibitions take place, has a café and bookshop and quite a large collection of photography publications in its library.

Kid’s interest in photography is also encouraged here, with a number of workshops, guided tours and school education programmes offered by the museum. Foam is notably the first museum in the Netherlands to work with deaf museum educators, who offer tours and workshops in Dutch sign language. The museum educators are also experienced in working with mild to moderate learning and behavioural difficulties and auditory or verbal special needs, so all levels of learning abilities are actively encouraged to take part in the programmes they have on offer.

Among many of the exhibitions and special events going on at Foam at the moment, is the Diane Arbus exhibition. A New York-born photographer, her anthropological portraits of couples, children, nudists, giants, dwarfs, transvestites and so on, is certainly contemporary. It gives people ‘food for thought’ about human nature.

I followed a basic and intermediate photography course in 2010 and 2011 with Patricia Ribas, our teacher. She emailed me and a lot of other past and present photography students recently to see if we would be interested in going to see this exhibition. We thought we’d combine it with the Foam – Thursday Dinners, where you can enjoy dinner at their café on a Thursday evening and have a free tour of the exhibition.

This special offer is available from 1^st November 2012 to 10^th January 2013 and the cost is 15 Euros. The kitchen is open from 18.00pm and with a full tummy, you can then join the 19.30pm tour and have access to all the exhibitions until 21.00pm when the museum closes. Reservations are recommended especially for the free tour, so Patricia booked a table for us all.The reply that she got from Foam was that they don’t book dinners for groups larger than four people and they were nearly fully booked for the evening we wanted to go there. Our group was going to be at least eight people, so unfortunately we’ll have to forget about dinner there. But we are still going to go to the exhibition and I’m looking forward to that.

Foam Editions presents a selection of signed prints by young, talented photographers at attractive prices. They also ask internationally acclaimed photographers who have had an exhibition in Foam or have been published in the Foam magazine to make work available especially for the gallery. Along with a great selection of antiquarian photo books and autographed books, there are a large amount of limited-edition prints to choose from.

What I think is even more interesting is their Inspiration section on their website. There are various inspiration trailers and films to give photographers something to work with, when experimenting with their cameras. There are also different assignments and photography contests on the website which budding photographers can take part in. The best photographs of these contests are shown on Flickr.

So a surprisingly vast amount of exhibitions, tours, workshops and photo books await your attention at Foam Museum. Get there before the crowd does!