Woonhuis 1914 - 1919

Curator: This is a photograph simply titled "Woonhuis", believed to have been taken anonymously sometime between 1914 and 1919. It seems to capture a dwelling within a landscape. Editor: My immediate sense is one of starkness, almost brutal simplicity. The horizon line cuts the composition in half, while the building, set slightly askew, provides the main structure and geometry of the scene. Curator: Indeed. The building presents as a kind of rectangular prism, softened somewhat by the implied recession of its covered veranda and echoed by a structure set in the left mid-ground of the frame. There’s a deliberate interplay between the severe rectilinear form and the organic lushness that surrounds it. Editor: It feels as though that structure—the building—has been imposed, an unnatural object embedded into the landscape rather than integrated into it. I’m particularly drawn to the uncultivated foreground, a rough texture that emphasizes the rawness and the disruption caused by whatever labor was required to plant that structure in that place. Curator: Precisely. One might consider the visual tension generated by the seemingly arbitrary placement of the structure against its backdrop, a dynamic of inside/outside, civilization/nature perhaps. Notice the way the palm fronds partially obscure and reveal the hard, sharp lines of the building; it generates a reading of concealment or revelation, setting up a semiotic tension. Editor: It brings up a number of questions about its material construction and origins—Where was this built? How did the landscape around this woonhuis inform its design, or influence construction of this style of dwelling in that environment? And how might the workers who constructed the dwelling have engaged with this landscape and its resources? Curator: Interesting point; the material relationship between form and context is important here. Editor: Right. Overall, what I’m really drawn to are the social contexts implicit in the photo’s making: of a structure constructed through available, and I suspect exploited, labor for a colonial landscape, frozen into stark black-and-white, the photograph as a physical artifact recording power dynamics as much as an aesthetic landscape. Curator: Yes. An unresolved tension preserved in silver nitrate. Editor: I'll agree to that.