The Recognition Machine

angry (44.4%), neutral (29.1%), fear (18.1%)
—Algorithmic speculation (FER2013)

The archive of Wereldculturen.nl holds the photographic collections of 3 museums: Volkenkundig museum, Tropenmuseum and Afrikamuseum. It is one of the leading and best documented collections for colonial photography, with images taken in old Dutch colonies but also collections from the broader colonized world. It was the first institution to contribute images to this project (with 2600 images). This was helpful to convince other institutions to open up. Innovatory was also, that Wereldculturen.nl added the artistic use as a tag to the database. This has recently changed: artists names and projects are no longer a selection criterium, and a new emphasis lies on the fact that you can buy the image (add to basket). But it kept its ease of access: with a few clicks, one can find available contextual information on photographers, their mission, a specific collection..

The contextual information still breathes the old imperial, colonial thinking. Info on the persons in the image is often limited to a colonial categorization or even a condescending comment. Sometimes there is information on the photographer, their mission, the collector who gave the image to the museum etc. Please take a look at how the colonized people are represented and described. You may react on this (mis)representation (in the comments section, under this text).

The search terms that we used to find the images are temporal: between 1840 and 1920, geographical, and then 'man', 'woman', 'child'.

The archival 19th century anthropometric and other colonial photographs we use were made by European photographers – hired or supported by anthropologists, by the military, by the state – as part of a project to invent "races" of people, to pitch these groups against each other and to establish a hierarchy that placed the white man at the top of the "other" "inferior" cultures. This project was based on pseudo-scientific ideas of race, ideas that are no longer accepted, yet which carry a legacy. The photographs were used to support the installation of institutional racism.

It was often a violent moment when the photograph was taken. It was grabbed without consent while or just after the town was conquered and looted. That is not the only form of violence present: the representation of people as 'other' and lesser, the categorization as an act of power, the diminishing of a culture, the documenting and archiving this culture as 'belonging to the past' (while in the act of destroying it), taking away a person's agency over their representation, and the regime of surveillance thus created, are acts of violence in themselves.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay wrote extensively on these topics in her book Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism ISBN 9781788735711