Villa van Raden Saleh en verschillende beroepen 1863 - 1866

Curator: So, what's your initial gut reaction to this albumen print, "Villa van Raden Saleh en verschillende beroepen," snapped between 1863 and 1866 by Woodbury & Page? It resides here in the Rijksmuseum. Editor: It feels like peering through a colonial keyhole. Stiff, staged, and somehow both romantic and utterly clinical. Curator: Yes, a loaded phrase I find apt for a visual record constructed with clear social stratification. Let's decode some of this Orientalist tableau, as the composition seems arranged with the villa, the Raden Saleh's Villa as the centre piece, and the workers and occupations. Editor: It's almost anthropological, presenting these 'types' alongside the imposing architecture, a very clean separation of life in different photographs, quite sterile in the construction. It reminds me of Victorian collectionism where humans are posed with nature, similar to pressed flower samples for example. Curator: Indeed. The landscape serves as a backdrop for portraits, yes? Capturing daily life... filtered through a photographer’s European perspective. We can read these staged portraits as carefully curated constructs and symbols of power. What feelings do these visual grammars transmit? Editor: A strange tension. It attempts to freeze these roles but instead, hints at the fragility of a moment in time. The artificiality, to me, almost underscores the inevitable ephemerality of any perceived societal order. Like butterflies pinned under glass. Curator: A brilliant description of pinning. The very act of photography – light touching a surface – to memorialize... or calcify a hierarchy. Yet the soft focus, the almost sepia tones softens its documentary ambition. I am captivated. Editor: Incredibly, it gives a nostalgic appeal to me despite its initial stark impression. I look at each face within these framed captures. One might glimpse resilience, quiet dissent or perhaps sheer boredom masked beneath an imposed decorum. And these echoes haunt beyond their temporal moment to say much about power. Curator: Perhaps these ghostly reminders of colonial legacy have offered some light on this carefully organized image of villa and vocation? Editor: Definitely. It is less a snapshot in time, than a collection of echoes bouncing around power and portrayal and photography, across all the picture planes.