Vier foto's van vrouwen en meisjes, onder andere Lilly Mohr, in Batavia 1908 - 1910

Carolina Onnen captured these four photographs of women and girls, including Lilly Mohr, in Batavia. These images offer a glimpse into the lives of the Dutch colonial community in the early 20th century. Consider the setting: Batavia, now Jakarta, was the capital of the Dutch East Indies, a society marked by strict racial and class hierarchies. The carefully composed portraits, the European fashions, and the leisurely poses all speak to the privileged status of these women within that colonial context. The act of photographing itself was a technology of power, used to document and classify the colonized world. But here, the camera is in the hands of a woman, potentially offering a more intimate perspective on her own community. To fully understand these images, we might turn to archival sources: colonial records, family histories, and studies of Dutch colonial culture. These photographs remind us that art is never created in a vacuum, but is always shaped by the social and political forces of its time.