Hangbrug 1931 - 1940

Editor: This is an interesting photograph titled "Hangbrug," placing it somewhere between 1931 and 1940, found here at the Rijksmuseum, but by an anonymous artist. It's striking because the industrial structure of the bridge cuts across this otherwise lush, natural landscape. How do you read this juxtaposition? Curator: I think you’ve hit on something important right away. I’m drawn to the relationship between the materials at play. We have this fabricated metal bridge – likely built with steel from somewhere else – imposed upon an organic, decidedly tropical locale. We see the labour inherent in extracting, processing, transporting and assembling the raw materials set against the 'unproductive' growth of a rainforest. What’s at stake when industrial ambition meets natural processes, captured here through the craft of photography? Editor: So, you're focusing on how the bridge’s existence, its physical making, impacts our view of the natural environment in the photo. Curator: Precisely! What does it mean to consume the landscape for resources to build this connection? Is the bridge a symbol of progress or exploitation? Or is that too binary? Where are the laborers, the engineers? The photographic process itself: what chemical processes, and extraction of materials went into creating this image? The artist doesn’t provide easy answers; instead, they foreground the tensions within industrialisation and the complex relationships to production this image holds. Editor: That’s really interesting. I was so caught up in the visual contrast that I missed thinking about the labor involved in creating both the bridge and the photo itself. Curator: Seeing it as just a nice cityscape misses a great deal of complexity. Considering the social and material conditions of production opens up more fertile avenues of interpretation. Editor: I agree. I'll definitely look at photographs differently now. I had not considered that by choosing to focus on material, there were still layers upon layers of extraction to consider.