Fotoalbum van Bennink en Riphagen, architecten en aannemers te Medan 1914-1919

Editor: Here we have a photograph of a photo album from 1914-1919. The album, titled "Fotoalbum van Bennink en Riphagen, architecten en aannemers te Medan," features albumen prints. It's strikingly simple, almost austere in its presentation. What strikes you about it? Curator: I see a material document deeply embedded in a network of labor and extraction. Albumen prints speak directly to the industrialization of photography. Think of the egg whites needed for the printing process, gathered from who knows where. And then consider Bennink and Riphagen's architectural projects in Medan. Who built those structures? Whose resources were used? This image compels us to investigate the physical and social conditions of its making. Editor: So you see the object itself as a record of these processes, the architecture, the labour involved... it wasn’t necessarily the *intended* subject, but that’s what is important here. Curator: Exactly. Medan at this time would have been a Dutch colony with its own dynamics of extraction and export. Medan depended on cheap labor for it to exist. An albumen print in 1914 requires a global flow of material, labor and capital. Think about it: The material reality points us towards critical inquiry beyond the image itself. How does the materiality of this album implicate Dutch colonialism and early globalization? Editor: That's a perspective I hadn’t fully considered. I was focused on the image, the portraiture, not the inherent material cost and extraction process that underpins the object itself. Curator: Indeed! Examining art through its materiality brings us closer to the social forces that shape it and that it helped shaping as well. What does it make you consider now? Editor: It makes me rethink the relationship between photography, industry, and colonialism and reminds us that we can see these global dynamics in something as simple as a photograph.