Traces of war; survivors of the Burma and Sumatra railways
Jan Banning

During the Second World War, thousands of Dutch, British, Australian and American POWs were forced by the Japanese to work on the railways in Burma and Sumatra. 50-80 percent died under such terrible conditions. Photographer Jan Banning photographed 24 Dutch and Indonesian survivors, bravely revisiting this horrendous ordeal.

Jan Banning was born in Almelo, Holland, in 1954, of Dutch-East-Indies parents. At university he studied social and economic history, and has been a photographer since 1981, concentrating on reportage. A significant theme of his acclaimed work has been the aftermath of war – his highly personalized coverage of, for example, the affects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the crippling land mines in Cambodia, Arms into Art; in Mozambique, and the tentative and brittle relations between Croat and Serb in Vukovar, have all been internationally recognized. In 2003 he founded the publishing house Ipso Facto, which published his book Sporen van oorlog (Traces of War) in which he portrayed and interviewed 24 old men (among them his father), former forced labourers on the Burma and the Sumatra (Pakanbaroe) railways during the Second World War. The English language version was published by Trolley in 2005. Banning also has a pervasive interest in bureaucracies and how they affect the societies which they dominate. Comprehensively unravelling the strands and structures of these behemoths, he has produced revelatory work in Mozambique, India and Indonesia. He will not stop there.