Spoorbaan van het traject Pangkalpinang - Pangkal Balam op Bangka c. 1900 - 1920

Editor: Here we have an albumen print, taken some time between 1900 and 1920, showing the railway line between Pangkalpinang and Pangkal Balam. It has an almost ghostly feel. What's your perspective on this photo? Curator: Looking at this image, I am struck by the materiality and the context of its production. The albumen print process itself is crucial – a technology of colonial expansion, used to document and disseminate images of resource extraction and infrastructural development in places like Bangka. This railway line, we must remember, wasn't built in a vacuum. Editor: So, it's less about the aesthetic beauty, and more about what went into making it and what the image *represents*? Curator: Precisely. We need to consider who financed the railway, who built it, and whose resources were being transported. What kind of labor was involved in constructing it and photographing it? These material and social relationships are embedded within the image. What impact did that labor have on Bangka? Editor: I never thought of photography as a *tool* in that sense, it's powerful. Curator: Think of the photographer as part of a network of colonial power. The image, this ‘landscape,’ naturalizes a system of exploitation by presenting it as orderly and inevitable. Editor: I see what you mean. So much is left unsaid. Focusing on the production reveals layers that were invisible at first glance. Curator: Exactly. It prompts questions about how resources and labor were consumed to create infrastructure, and how that infrastructure transformed the land itself, reshaping both the environment and the social order. It changes how one views the landscape genre as a whole, I think.