Portrait of Semi (1931, West Java)
A photograph need not be a rapid record of a moment in time. Here the camera slowly explores the women’s worn faces; Banning searches for their emotionally charged history. In the Second World War they were forced into prostitution as ‘comfort women’ in the military
camps of the Japanese occupier. Banning makes portraits in which the long, arduous processing of war experiences is manifest and the slipping by of ‘historical’ time contained.