Tent, sleepboot en woningen 1929 - 1930

This is a photograph of a series of images, likely from the Dutch East Indies, showing a tent, a steamboat, and some houses. Though anonymous, these images, taken together, can tell us a lot about the social conditions of the area in which they were made. The tent and steamboat are potent symbols of colonial authority, and the houses would probably have been residences for Europeans living and working in the colony. The images act as a record of Dutch presence there. The formal arrangement, almost like a carefully curated scrapbook, further emphasises the Dutch colonial project in the East Indies. As historians, we look to archival materials like photographs and documents from the colonial period to understand the complex relationships between colonizers and colonized. In this case we would ask, for instance, what kind of social hierarchy is implied by the images and how does it comment on the distribution of resources? The meaning of this artwork resides not just in its images, but in its function as a tool for studying cultural and institutional history.