A new exhibition of more than 200 photographs charts 300 years of image-making in the US, showing how the country's history and photography have run in parallel.

In 1840, using a self-made copper plate, Henry Fitz Jnr produced one of the world's first selfies, his eyes gently closed to prevent any blinking from spoiling the result. In creating this striking blue image, he was doing more than record his appearance; he was also documenting America's first essays into an art form that would tell its story in radical new ways.

Fitz's self-portrait, along with more than 200 other photographs, chart 300 years of image-making at the Rijksmuseum's newest exhibition American Photography, Europe's first comprehensive survey of this subject. Complemented by international loans, the exhibition showcases, for the first time, the museum's own collection of American images, which it has been busy expanding since 2007.

For co-curators Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, the exhibition's starting point was to show the US through the differing perspectives of its photographers. Americans were "using this medium as we [the Dutch] used painting in the 17th Century," Boom tells the BBC. "America and photography run parallel. The medium is so connected with the country."

The exhibition has deliberately departed from a "top 100" approach, Rooseboom adds, stating "that would have been too easy". Instead, works by icons such as Robert Frank, Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus sit alongside mementos, postcards and adverts – "surprisingly good images that nobody knows," he says.

A 19th-Century tintype (an image made on a sheet of metal) featuring a man and woman in front of a rustic barn is a case in point. The image was probably sold on the spot by a travelling tin typist "for a modest price", explains Rooseboom. "Many people had just arrived and were living in the countryside, no big city nearby, so this was the only possibility of having your portrait taken." The man stands proud, looking at the camera, but the woman's head is bowed and she is looking away. "Sometimes you can sense that people were simply not used to being photographed," says Rooseboom. "Nowadays, we've seen in magazines and movies how to pose elegantly." This may be the only time in their whole life that they would be photographed, and the result, adds Boom, "would hang on the wall of the house where they lived forever".

By contrast, a 1913 postcard featuring 12,000 employees of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit may have been the "most expensive picture that was ever taken", quipped a newspaper at the time, as the factory had to shut down for two hours to assemble the staff. The image, the company boasted, was "the largest specially posed group picture ever made" and illustrates a turning point where industry saw the value in investing large sums in promotional photography. Taken in the year when Ford introduced America's first moving assembly line and the US had become the world's largest economy, the photograph also depicts the mass production that would shape the country.

The image's reappearance in Ford marketing also made it an early example of photoshopping. While the same tinted faces swarmed in the foreground, the number of employees cited in the caption increased exponentially, and a building to the left was cropped out in one version and acquired extra floors in another. "Apparently, many photographers and their publishers had no qualms about abandoning their medium's potential for realism," write Boom and Rooseboom in the exhibition catalogue.

A decade on, the New York portrait photographer James Van Der Zee was also embellishing his work, drawing jewellery on to his subjects and retouching........

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