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Table of Contents
Close-ups
Herman Salzwedel, antiquity and the camera
Susie Protschky (2014/ 2025)
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| #SP 2-01: Herman Salzwedel Hindu Singosari temple c 1885 |
Herman Salzwedel (c1855 – after 1904) cofounded a photographic studio in Batavia (now Jakarta) with Isidore van Kinsbergen in 1878 before setting out on his own in Surabaya the following year. In 1894, he sold his studio and travelled to China to set up in Shanghai. His Dutch East Indies studio was run thereafter by different photographers until 1913 and would be his competition when he returned to Indonesia in 1894.1
This photograph shows Candi Singosari, the tower temple in the complex that was the capital of the thirteenth-century Hindu-Buddhist Singosari kingdom. The identity of the man in the photograph is unknown, and probably less relevant to Salzwedel than the sense of scale his presence provides.
Javanese antiquities were the first subjects to be photographed in the Dutch East Indies in the 1840s, soon after the invention of the daguerreotype process, but it took several decades for a commercial market for such images to develop. Salzwedel’s interest in the photographic possibilities of Hindu-Buddhist ruins was no doubt piqued by the work of his former business partner, van Kinsbergen, who undertook the first large-scale study of such monuments on Java in the 1860s.2
After that, no respectable studio photographer could afford to omit pictures of Javanese antiquities from his or her portfolio. Salzwedel’s commercial photographs of Candi Singosari in the mid 1880s were prescient: the first major archaeological study of the complex in 1909 was still decades away, let alone the first refurbishment of the temple in 1936.3
The dilapidated state of the temple in Salzwedel’s photograph, opposite, not only represents its unrestored condition in the late nineteenth century but also partly reflects Javanese veneration of sacred monuments in an untouched condition.4
The photograph also satisfies the taste for picturesque ruins that was still relevant to popular European appreciation of antiquities in this period.
In the Dutch East Indies, when it came to representing sacred monuments and landscapes, European artists showed a strong preference for relics from a time before the arrival of Islam in the archipelago. This penchant became more pronounced as political challenges to Dutch rule from Muslim communities and political parties increased, particularly once Western artists and travellers ‘discovered’ Hindu Bali in the early twentieth century.
Unlike the Orientalists, Dutch photographers and painters drew more imaginative inspiration from Hindu-Buddhist than from Muslim landscapes in the Dutch East Indies.5
Footnotes
- 1 Gerda Theuns-de Boer, ‘The many talents of Isidore van Kinsbergen: a life spent in service to theatre, photography and archaeology’, in GT Boer & S Asser, Isidore van Kinsbergen (1821–1905): photo pioneer and theatre maker in the Dutch East Indies, KITLV Press, Leiden, Uitgeverij Aprilis, Zaltbommel, & Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, 2005, p 82; and Steven Wachlin, ‘Salzwedel’, in K Peterson, In het voetspoor van Louis Couperus: Pasoeroean door de lens van Salzwedel, KIT Publishers, Amsterdam, 2009, pp 112–8.
- 2 The albums were Oudheden van Java (1872) and Boro-Boedoer (1874). See Boer & S Asser, Isidore van Kinsbergen (1821–1905), pp 276–9.
- 3 Ann R Kinney, Worshipping Siva and Buddha: the temple art of East Java, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2003, p 138.
- 4 Peter Boomgaard, ‘Oriental nature, its friends and its enemies: conservation of nature in late colonial Indonesia, 1889–1949’, Environment and History, vol5, no3, 1999, p 263.
- 5 Susie Protschky, ‘Articles of faith: religion, fear and fantasy in Indies landscapes’, in S Protschky, Images of the tropics: environment and visual culture in colonial Indonesia, KITLV Press, Leiden, 2011, pp 103–26.
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