Pagina 136 en 137 van fotoboek van de Algemeene Vereeniging van Rubberplanters ter Oostkust van Sumatra (A.V.R.O.S.) c. 1924 - 1925

This photograph is from a photo book of the Algemeene Vereeniging van Rubberplanters ter Oostkust van Sumatra, or A.V.R.O.S., made around the early 20th century. There's something haunting about this image. It's a landscape, but not one of leisure. The photograph is sepia toned and quite grainy, giving it a sense of age and also a kind of starkness. The composition is dominated by these endless rows of rubber trees, a very bleak geometry. The figures working the land are small, almost lost in the immensity of the plantation. The texture of the land looks dry and cracked. There's a tension between the implied labor and the quiet stillness of the photograph. It reminds me a bit of some of the Dust Bowl photographs from the American Depression, but here it's in Sumatra, with rubber instead of wheat. You might compare this to the work of someone like Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed industrial structures with a similar detached, almost clinical eye.