Suikermolens en werknemers in een hal van suikerfabriek Goedo te Djombang op Java c. 1925 - 1930

Isken made this silver gelatin print of a sugar factory hall, probably sometime in the early 20th century. It's a landscape of industry, sepia toned, with the sugar mills looming like fantastic beasts in a cage of beams and girders. I can just imagine Isken, setting up his camera to get the light just right. He might have been thinking about how to capture the scale of this place, to show the workers dwarfed by the machinery. Maybe he felt a sense of awe, or maybe he was thinking about the colonial economy that this factory was a part of. That single figure standing by a trolley really gets me. The artist, like a painter mixing colors, uses the human to give a sense of scale to the industrial landscape. It’s about the tension between the individual and this vast system of production, which is what so much art is about: human experience in an ever-changing world. It all connects, doesn't it? We look and learn from each other across time.