Das Album.

order and safety in the African protectorates, particularly to combat the slave trade.“ The abolition of the Arab-dominated slave trade was used as a pretext and justification for German rule. In reality, the fight against slavery progressed slowly, partly because the colonial administration depended on the support of Arab and African elites. Around 1900, there were still 400,000 enslaved people in German East Africa, and by 1914, there were still 165,000 of them.
As slavery gradually diminished, the colonial administration faced a shortage of labor for plantations, mines, and railway construction. To fill this gap, they implemented various forms of forced labor. In 1905, a head tax was introduced, which had to be paid through forced labor on cotton fields. This was the spark that ignited the Maji Maji Rebellion.
The most brutal form of forced labor occurred from 1904 to 1908 in Namibia (then German South West Africa) during the German genocide against the Herero and Nama. In 1905, concentration camps were established, where German soldiers imprisoned 25,000 people and forced them into grueling labor. 7,000 of the prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, thirst, or disease.

This photo shows seven women engaged in forced labor with large hammers on a road. They are chained together by metal rings around their necks to prevent escape. With tear-filled eyes and expressions of contempt, they look into the camera.
This photograph, like the ones of the Black women below, was printed and sold as a „souvenir postcard.“ On the opposite side of the exhibition, you will find a lyrical commentary on the photograph by Patricia Vester.

In this arranged sequence of images on one level, with the two Black individuals sorted first, I read both their daily life in East Africa and their family in Germany. The photographs of the two Black individuals gain significance due to their size. Further back in the album, there is the postcard of the seven chained women and girls, as if to justify this arrangement.
What we do not see in these images is the context, the atmosphere of the space, the person taking the photograph, whether these depictions were also repeatedly sold and used for male gratification, what appeal this male arrangement had for him, and what associations he had with it.
What can be discerned is the voyeuristic gaze of a man who found a racist way to engage with the humiliation reflected in these images.
It remains questionable how the photographs preserved in the collection support and make available the reproduction of colonial imagery for whom, for what purposes, and how images like that might be utilized and employed by AI in the future.