Transport per rupstractor van een turbine 1937 - 1938

Curator: What a photograph. It looks incredibly bleak, yet simultaneously it possesses this captivating sense of scale. Editor: Indeed. This gelatin-silver print, taken between 1937 and 1938, and now housed at the Rijksmuseum, is titled “Transport per rupstractor van een turbine”. The photograph depicts, quite literally, the transport of a turbine via crawler tractor. Curator: I am interested by the two figures. The tractor operator, regal with a hat and, I would assume, dark complexion against his anonymous peer standing beside the turbine—an implicit declaration, perhaps, of labor disparity amidst colonial enterprise? The entire image strikes me as rather sad...a melancholy grayness clinging to its mechanical, unwieldy soul. Editor: Your read definitely echoes the disquieting historical context of industrialization and colonialism. Look closely, though, at how the light plays on the massive turbine. The inscription is most likely written in Dutch and some local Indonesian language. And indeed, such grand constructions often extracted resources from colonized lands while disrupting indigenous lifeways. I feel photography provides such complex documentations. Curator: There’s a brutal honesty in that photographic treatment that feels almost unintentional. Like a forgotten witness whispering truths we’d rather not hear. Editor: Precisely! It also reflects how these advancements had differential impacts. Whose labor fueled progress? Whose voices are silent in its wake? It seems even landscapes possess social and political identities, or they’re made to mean and function politically. Curator: Right. But ultimately, I love it, not in spite of that, but because it reminds me to never stop asking, never stop looking, even when, or especially when, the view is overwhelmingly gray. Editor: Precisely; these moments from the past offer glimpses to better confront our present.