Colonial Times in a Frame of Beauty

Alphons Hustinx captured 1930s Indonesia. A tourism promotion which also portrayed the dark colonial times.

July 14, 2009

DIENG Highlands, 1938. Eight men wrapped in sarongs, shorts and traditional caps were carrying two sedan chairs, with a Caucasian man in each. They hauled the men to the famous Javanese hot spring. This blackandwhite imagery shows not only the exotic Dieng scene, but also the grim picture of colonization: the natives were “slaves” whose sole task was to serve their “owners.”

That is one of the photographs being displayed in the ‘Travel

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