A Changing Scene

Abstract

This paper examines the changing scene of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial photography in the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia). The mid-nineteenth century collection of Woodbury & Page Photographers Java gives us insight into a mixing of vernacular and European architectural languages as experimented with in numerous buildings and colonial settlements throughout the archipelago. A prolific commercial studio, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java was established in Batavia in 1857 by two Englishmen, Walter Woodbury and James Page, following their brief and unsuccessful stay in Australia. Contrastingly, the early twentieth-century photography of the Dutch architect Pieter A. J. Moojen is dominated by the framing of a seemingly contained, pure and exotic indigenous architectural otherness constantly championed in lieu of the rapidly modernising and Europeanised urban settlements in other parts of the colony. The two generations of colonial photographers and the changing architectural scenes captured through their lenses represent a complex landscape of built forms, colonial society and colonial agency in the Indies. This change of scene also signals the rise of the dominant tradition of twentieth-century architectural historiography in the colony and, subsequently, Indonesia. This tradition is governed by a certain way of seeing, a selective visual framing of indigenous built forms as “traditional” and “authentic” other, an exotic antithesis of the modern colonial architectural movement, while marginalising the archipelago's shifting cosmopolitan architectural landscape.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The author would like to express her gratitude to the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies Archival Centre for the generous permission to use and reproduce the photographs of Woodbury & Page Photographers Java and Isidore van Kinsbergen in this paper. She would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms of the earlier version of this paper.

Notes

^1. For example, see Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850–1900, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, ed., (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2004); Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson, eds., (New York: Routledge, 2002); Photography East: The Camera in East and Southeast Asia, Rosalind C. Morris, ed., (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009); Vikramadya Prakash, “Between Objectivity and Illusion: Architectural Photography in the Colonial Frame,” Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 1 (2001): 13–20; Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the “Native” and the Making of European Identities (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999).

^2. In his study on the landscape of mosque architecture in Indonesia, Kees van Dijk points out that some of the oldest illustrations in sailors' notes seemed to have “Europeanised” the mosques to the extent that they were drawn in the image of a church, regardless of their actual condition. See Kees van Dijk, “The Changing Contour of Mosques,” in The Past in the Present: Architecture in Indonesia, ed. Peter J. M. Nas (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006), 45–66.

^3. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson, “Photography, ‘Race’, and Post-Colonial Theory,” introduction to Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (New York: Routledge, 2002), 8. See also Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71, no. 5 (May 1983): 118–31.

^4. For an analysis of how the last royal family of Hawai'i used photography as a medium of resistance by self-recording and publicising their presence, see Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions, 192–221. See also Prakash, “Between Objectivity and Illusion,” 19–20.

^5. Philip Goldswain and William Taylor, “Introduction,” in An Everyday Transience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer, eds. Philip Goldswain and William Taylor (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2010), 1–7.

^6. Goldswain and Taylor, An Everyday Transience, 3.

^7. See notably Stephen Wachlin, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994), Toward Independence: A Century of Indonesia Photographed, Jane Levy Reed, ed., (San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, 1991), and Scott Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000).

^8. The work of Karen Strassler, which looks into the production of popular photography in postcolonial Indonesia and the role of Chinese Indonesian photographers in the development of the genre, signals an important turn in the field. Popular photography is here analysed not only as an active medium of identity imagining among the Javanese people, but also as a realm where the agency of the persistently marginalised Indonesian Chinese ethnic group in the shaping of the emerging sense of modernity in the nation can be observed. See Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

^9. For a critical historical account on the Dutch ethical policy, see Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–23. See also Marieke Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies at the World Exhibitions, 1880–1931, trans. Beverley Jackson (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006), 224–25. For an examination of how the policy affected the architectural discourses in the colony, see Iwan Sudradjat, “A Study of Indonesian Architectural History,” PhD diss. University of Sydney, 1991, 7–13. See also Abidin Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 25–48.

^10. Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial, 29.

^11. For a historical biographical study and extensive presentation of the collection of the Woodbury & Page Photographers Java, see Wachlin, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java.

^12. Wachlin, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java, 9.

^13. Alan Elliot, “Annotation: Walter Woodbury's Panorama of Melbourne,” La Trobe Journal, no. 65 (Autumn 2000): 28–30, accessed 12 June, 2012, http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-65/latrobe-65-028.html.

^14. Wachlin, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java, 4.

^15. Of the same generation of photographers working on the Indies in mid-nineteenth century, see the collections of Isidore van Kinsbergen and Kassian Chepas. For a study on van Kinsbergen's photographs, see Gerda Theuns-de Boer and Saskia Asser, Isidore van Kinsbergen (1821–1905): Fotopionier en Theatermaker in Nederlands-Indie (Photo Pioneer and Theatre Maker in the Dutch East Indies) (Zaltbommel: KITLV Press, 2005). For a study on Kassian Chepas, the first Javanese photographer in history, see Gerrit Knaap, Cephas, Yogyakarta: Photography in the Service of the Sultan (Leiden: Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 1999).

^16. On the work of Schaefer, see H. J. Moeshart, “Adolph Schaefer and Borobudur,” in Toward Independence, ed. Jane Levy Reed (San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, 1991), 21–28.

^17. Theuns-de Boer and Asser, Isidore van Kinsbergen (1821–1905), 78, see also 80–82.

^18. Cor Passchier, “Colonial Architecture in Indonesia: References and Developments,” in The Past in the Present: Architecture in Indonesia, ed. Peter J. M. Nas (Rotterdam: NAi Press, 2006), 97–112. See also Abidin Kusno, “The Afterlife of the Empire Style: Indische Architectuur and Art Deco,” in The Past in the Present: Architecture in Indonesia, ed. Peter J. M. Nas (Rotterdam: NAi Press, 2006), 131–46.

^19. Wachlin, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java, 75. For another example of the adoption of European architectural expression in mosque architecture in the Indies, see also the photographs of the Great Mosque of Palembang in this publication.

^20. Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs.

^21. Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs, 60.

^22. For a historical account of Batavia, see Adolf Heuken, Historical Sites of Jakarta (Jakarta: Cipta Loka Saraka, 1982). See also Maya Jayapal, Old Jakarta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

^23. Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj (London: Faber, 1989); Jakarta-Batavia: Socio-cultural Essays, eds. Kees Grijns and Peter J. M. Nas (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2000).

^24. Passchier, “Colonial Architecture in Indonesia,” 98–100. On Karsten's and Pont's works and adaptations of Javanese vernacular built forms, see Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial, 25–48. On Schoemaker's architectural works and adaptations of Javanese and Indian architectural antiquities, see C. Jan van Dullemen, Tropical Modernity: Life and Work of C.P. Wolff Schoemaker (Amsterdam: SUN, 2010). See also the analysis of the polemic surrounding the making of Indies' architectural style between Schoemaker, Karsten and Pont in Stephen Cairns, “Re-Surfacing: Architecture, Wayang, and the ‘Javanese House’,” in Postcolonial Space(s), eds. Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai (New York: Princeton University Press, 1997), 73–88. On Pont's works and life, see Gerrit de Vries and Dorothee Segaar-Höweler, Henri Maclaine Pont (1884–1971): Architect, Structural Engineer, Archaeologist (Rotterdam: Stichting BONAS, 2009).

^25. Geoffrey London, “Bearing Witness: The Making of a City (A Pictorial Essay),” in An Everyday Transience, eds. Goldswain and Taylor, 21.

^26. Wachlin, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java, 11–13.

^27. A number of recent studies have started to use the Woodbury & Page Photographers Java collection as their entry point in exploring the colonial history of architecture and urbanism of Indonesia. See, for example, Abidin Kusno, The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 125–52 and 223–77, also van Dijk, “The Changing Contour of Mosques,” 60–66.

^28. Pieter A. J. Moojen, Kunst op Bali: Inleidende Studie tot de Bouwkunst (Den Haag: Adi Poestaka, 1926).

^29. Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles, 409.

^30. Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles, 291–95.

^31. Passchier, “Colonial Architecture in Indonesia,” 105.

^32. Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 48–49. See also Amanda Achmadi, “The Architecture of Balinisation: Writings on Architecture, the Villages, and the Construction of Balinese Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century,” PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2007.

^33. See Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created (Singapore: Periplus Editions Ltd., 1990).

^34. Wijnand O. J. Nieuwenkamp, Bali en Lombok (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1906–10).

^35. For an analysis of twentieth-century writings on the architecture of the island of Bali, see Achmadi, “The Architecture of Balinisation,” 106–85.

^36. Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise, 4–9.

^37. For an example of Bali's indigenous architectural codes, see a translation and study of South Bali's building codes in Douglas I. Fettling, “The Balinese Building Codes and Their Application to Domestic Architecture in South Bali,” Master of Architecture thesis, University of Melbourne, 1971.

^38. See Amanda Achmadi, “Reading Urban Bali: Untold History, Unwanted Urbanism,” RIMA: Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 44, no. 2 (2010): 149–78.

^39. See Henk Schulte Nordholt, “The Making of Traditional Bali: Colonial Ethnography and Bureaucratic Reproduction,” in Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, eds. P. Pels and O. Salemnik (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 264–65.

^40. Hight and Sampson, Colonialist Photography, 9.