Rotterdam’s Nederlands Fotomuseum Reopens in Monumental Santos Warehouse, Backed by €38 Million Gift

The smell of freshly ground Brazilian coffee drifts through the ground floor of a century-old warehouse on Rotterdam’s south bank. At one table, a visitor flips through a heavy photobook; nearby, a group of teenagers crowd into a vintage photo booth, waiting for a strip of wet, black-and-white portraits to clatter into the tray.

Above them, behind interior windows cut into the brick-and-concrete shell, gloved conservators lean over light tables, dusting negatives that have documented nearly two centuries of Dutch life.

A new home in Pakhuis Santos

On Saturday, the Nederlands Fotomuseum reopened to the public in Pakhuis Santos, a former coffee warehouse on Rijnhaven in the Katendrecht district, marking a new chapter for the Dutch national museum of photography—and for a waterfront that is rapidly trading industry for culture, housing and leisure.

The move, completed after several years of renovation and a delayed opening, relocates the museum from its longtime base in the nearby Las Palmas warehouse on Wilhelminapier into a larger, purpose-built home that combines galleries, depots, conservation labs, a library, artist studios and hospitality.

“We finally have a building that does justice to the size, quality and ambition of our collection and programming,” interim director Roderick van der Lee said at a press preview. “For the first time, visitors can see not only the photographs on the walls, but also the craftsmanship, research and conservation work that keep this heritage alive.”

A €38 million donation and a protected landmark

The relocation was made possible by a single €38 million donation in 2023 from the Rotterdam-based Droom en Daad Foundation. The gift allowed the museum to purchase and refit the Santos warehouse on the condition that the institution remain in Rotterdam, securing the city’s status as home to the national photography collection at a time when rising rents were pushing the museum out of its old site.

Built in 1901 and 1902 as a storage depot for coffee imported from the Brazilian port of Santos, the eight-story brick warehouse was once a key node in Rotterdam’s trade network. Listed as a national monument since 2000, it is regarded by heritage authorities as one of the best-preserved examples of early 20th-century warehouse architecture in the Netherlands.

The redesign by Hamburg-based Renner Hainke Wirth Zirn Architekten, working with Rotterdam firm WDJArchitecten and specialist contractor Burgy Bouwbedrijf, preserves the characteristic brick façades and robust concrete structure while carving out a central light well and vertical circulation core. Inside, a climate-controlled “box within a box” now holds the museum’s depots and restoration labs, inserted as a separate volume within the historic shell to meet conservation standards without altering the exterior.

A vertical museum campus

From the ground floor up, the building is conceived as a vertical museum campus. The street-level zone is freely accessible without a ticket and includes a café, bookshop and a library the museum describes as housing one of Europe’s largest collections of photobooks. The café serves a Santos house-blend coffee developed with a local roaster, a nod to the building’s former life as a coffee warehouse.

Exhibition floors above host the institution’s core displays. The Gallery of Honour of Dutch Photography, first unveiled in 2021 in Las Palmas, has been rehung as a centerpiece. The permanent presentation brings together 99 images that trace the development of photography in the Netherlands from the 19th century to the digital era, featuring work by Anton Corbijn, Ed van der Elsken, Rineke Dijkstra, Erwin Olaf and others.

For its reopening, the museum is also presenting “Rotterdam in Focus,” an exhibition of more than 300 photographs of the city from 1843 to the present. The images chart Rotterdam’s transformation from industrial port to postwar reconstruction site and, more recently, to a center of high-rise architecture and cultural branding.

Another inaugural show, “Ontwaken in blauw. Een ode aan cyanotypie” (“Awakening in Blue. An Ode to Cyanotype”), focuses on one of photography’s oldest processes, known for its deep blue tone. Combining early cyanotype prints with work by 15 contemporary artists, the exhibition examines ecology, colonial history and the body as a living archive. The presentation is designed by Dutch interdisciplinary collective MAISON the FAUX, known for theatrical installations that blur the boundaries between fashion, performance and exhibition design.

Conservation work brought into view

Behind the galleries, largely hidden in previous locations, the museum’s conservation and research work is now brought partly into view. Through interior windows, visitors can watch technicians digitize fragile negatives, repair torn prints and inspect film under microscopes.

“Photography is often seen as immaterial, something that just appears on a screen,” van der Lee said. “By showing the depots and labs, we want to make clear that these images are physical objects, vulnerable to time, light and temperature, that require care like any other heritage.”

The institution manages more than 6.5 million photographic objects—including negatives, prints, slides and digital files—and expects that number to reach about 7.5 million by 2028. The collection spans from the earliest decades after the invention of photography to contemporary work, with a strong focus on documentary and artistic photography from the Netherlands.

Leadership changes after internal turbulence

The reopening comes after a period of internal turbulence. In July 2025, the museum’s previous director, former newspaper editor and Mondriaan Fund chief Birgit Donker, was dismissed following an independent investigation commissioned by the supervisory board.

The inquiry, launched after staff complaints, concluded that Donker had on multiple occasions withheld or misrepresented information and attempted to influence oversight, leading to what the board called “an irreparable breach of trust.” Employees also described a “culture of fear” and an unsafe work environment. Donker disputed the findings, saying she did not recognize the picture painted in the report and that she felt “unheard.”

The leadership vacuum delayed the building’s opening, which had originally been announced for September 2025. The museum later said it had shifted the date to February 2026 to allow more preparation time and to align with the recruitment of new leadership.

On Feb. 2, just days before the public opening, the institution announced the appointment of curator Zippora Elders Tahalele as its new general and artistic director, effective April 13. Elders, who has held positions at Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum, Berlin’s Gropius Bau, Amsterdam photography museum Foam and the Sonsbeek 20→24 exhibition in Arnhem, was described by supervisory board chair Wanda van Kerkvoorden as “a figurehead of a new generation” who would strengthen the museum’s international visibility.

A cultural anchor in Rijnhaven’s redevelopment

The Santos project is also a key piece of a broader transformation of Rotterdam’s Rijnhaven. Dug in the late 19th century as a harbor for Rhine shipping and later deepened for seagoing vessels, the basin is now at the center of an ambitious mixed-use redevelopment that includes plans for 2,500 to 3,000 homes, offices, a large waterfront park, a city beach and floating green spaces. Municipal plans project full build-out around 2039.

In March 2025, Rotterdam’s city government approved designs for a new Rijnhavenpark and a series of floating parks between Wilhelminapier and Katendrecht. Alderman Chantal Zeegers said at the time that the floating parks showed “the courage, innovation and collaboration” with which the city was creating new green spaces on the water while adapting to climate challenges.

Alongside the Fotomuseum, the area has seen the conversion of another monumental warehouse into the Fenix migration museum—also funded by Droom en Daad—and the growth of Fenix Food Factory, the Luxor Theater and several high-end residential and hotel projects. Together, they are turning Rotterdam-Zuid’s waterfront into a dense cultural and commercial corridor.

Supporters argue the investments bring jobs, public spaces and educational facilities to a part of the city long associated with dock labor and lower incomes. At the Fotomuseum, the entire ground floor is free to enter, under-18s receive free admission to the galleries, and the institution has taken parts of its canon on tour to community centers and festivals elsewhere in the country.

At the same time, the clustering of cultural flagships and luxury housing in Rijnhaven is reshaping the social landscape of surrounding neighborhoods, raising questions about who benefits from the new waterfront and how rising property values will affect long-time residents.

From the museum’s rooftop restaurant, the tensions and possibilities of that transformation are visible in a single panorama: the Erasmus Bridge to the north, cranes and construction barges in the basin below, newly planted floating parks bobbing in the water and the brick shoulders of Pakhuis Santos itself, now housing one of the world’s largest photography collections.

Inside, in the blue-lit cyanotype galleries, images of plants, shorelines and bodies slowly emerge from paper exposed to sunlight, fixed in shades of deep indigo. A process nearly as old as photography is being used to examine present-day concerns about environment and history, much as a warehouse built for coffee from Brazil now holds visual records of Dutch society.

For the Nederlands Fotomuseum, and for Rotterdam, the reopening of Santos marks the start of a new chapter. The building that once stored commodities for trade now preserves a different kind of cargo: millions of images through which a country—and a city—will be able to see itself, and be seen, for decades to come.