Tinmijn te Soengeiliat 1900 - 1922

Robert Julius Boers made this stereograph, a double photograph, of a tin mine in Soengeiliat with a camera and chemicals sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. The sepia tone gives the whole scene an air of being far away, and long ago. When you look at the photograph, the material processes are mostly obscured. The way the chemicals reacted with the light to fix the image on the paper is almost invisible, but, when you let your eye wander over the image, you can imagine the labor involved in extracting the tin. See the figure, paused in the lower left of the frame, the way he holds the tool in his hand, this speaks to the working conditions of this place. The image is a record of a process, much like a painting. It preserves labor, but also obscures it through its aestheticisation. It reminds me of some of the earth works of Robert Smithson, only here it is a record of extraction not construction. Like all art, it invites us to question what we are seeing, how we see, and who benefits from what we see.