Zetterij van de Deli Courant Possibly 1908 - 1910

This photograph shows the ‘Zetterij van de Deli Courant,’ or printing house of the Deli newspaper. While we don’t know who took it, the image gives us a glimpse into the world of mass media production. Here we see a team of men engaged in the painstaking process of typesetting. Each worker is carefully arranging individual pieces of metal type into a frame, following a precise layout to create pages of text. The physical effort is palpable. This was skilled, specialized labor, but also repetitive and physically demanding. Consider the broader context: the Deli Courant was a Dutch-language newspaper published in Sumatra, Indonesia, during the colonial era. The workers are local Indonesian men. So, this image isn’t just about printing. It also speaks volumes about labor, power, and the spread of information in a colonial society. Thinking about the materiality of the newspaper—the ink, the paper, the very words themselves—helps us understand the newspaper’s role in shaping public opinion and maintaining social order. It reminds us that even something as seemingly simple as a printed page is the result of complex social and material processes.