Plantage Marienburg - Fabrieksgebouw 1900 - 1905

Editor: We're looking at "Plantage Marienburg - Fabrieksgebouw," a photograph taken between 1900 and 1905. The photographer is Eugen Klein, and it's now housed in the Rijksmuseum. It captures a factory scene, a place where I'm sure not everything seen in the frame makes for ideal living and working conditions. It's rather sobering. What catches your attention in this photograph? Curator: What strikes me immediately is how this image serves as a document of colonial economic infrastructure. The factory dominates the landscape, a visual representation of industrial ambition imposed on a plantation setting. Given the time, the "Marienburg" points to another site of German ambition. What would later happen under the name of the Third Reich would have already found early manifestations, maybe less radical but similarly colonial and mercantile, already back then. What is foregrounded, and what is backgrounded in your opinion? Editor: I see the train tracks really prominently—leading right into the factory—and also some figures walking about who appear in light-colored suits or dresses and look European to me. Curator: Precisely! Notice how those figures are placed? The composition suggests a social hierarchy—the factory and the tracks signifying the power of industry and European society with its own codes for garments and its control of movement and production on the island. The lives of the workers and inhabitants in Suriname is quite obviously out of focus and in the shadow, wouldn't you agree? Editor: I do see your point. I hadn't really noticed the way the composition directs my gaze, but it's now quite clear that the power dynamics were set into place through social norms as much as by visual representation in this artwork. Curator: It prompts us to consider the role photography played in shaping perceptions of colonial spaces, not merely as neutral documents, but as constructions reinforcing certain power structures. It should not be viewed as objective representation but is already propaganda for those who will profit most! It tells an ugly but true story. Editor: A really interesting point about the role of photography in that historical context and how our interpretation of that photograph is also to understand something bigger. Curator: Exactly. It highlights how images like these actively shaped, and continue to shape, our understanding of colonial history.