Plantage Accaribo 1913 - 1930

Theodoor Brouwers made this small stereograph, a photographic print viewed with a special viewer to appear three-dimensional. The picture shows Plantage Accaribo, a plantation in Suriname. Stereographs like this were popular forms of entertainment and education in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Dutch colonial empire relied on natural resource extraction from the colonies like Suriname. This photograph gives the viewer the impression of visiting a distant exotic land. But what isn’t shown in the photograph is just as telling. The viewer is given no information about who actually worked on the plantation. Slavery had been abolished a few decades before this photograph was made, but the plantation system remained, and the lives of workers were still highly controlled. When we look at a photograph like this, we need to investigate the history of Dutch colonialism and the legacy of slavery to understand the full picture.