Ladies & Gentlemen,

This is not a simple exposition of unique pretty pictures of the 19th century.
What you will be seeing here is the final product of a much larger project.

Once again, this project has put our precious little library, in the foreground by usage of modern technology to preserve historical data.  A development usually ignored by similar organizations….. and it was not by accident that we were the first local museum/library to initiate a web-site five years ago.

But in detail, the project entailed the following:

Getting the photographs:

To find photographs made in Curacao during the 19th century was quite an undertaking.  We cheated a little bit with the title and allowed entries up to 1918.
As you can imagine, these pictures were not in the greatest condition, and because of this condition of the photographs, we utilized less than 50% of the pictures obtained, in the exposition.

So, Why the exposition what do you do with these photographs ?

It was the George Maduro exposition, which we put together for Bureau “Koninkrijks-aangelegenheden” (whew) that got us started on the idea of this exposition.  Whereas there we reflected the life of George Maduro in a photo- exposition in his birth-house, in this jubilee-exposition we thought it interesting to accurately reflect the broad-base of our sephardic community in old pictures.

It was to become, and has become, what our people, looked like one hundred years ago.  The radiation of their facial expressions, dress, and surroundings speak volumes.

On top of that, we had to make sure that these photographs would also look like the way original photographs looked, one hundred years ago.