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Table of Contents
Close-Up
Thilly Weissenborn’s luminous touch
Anne Maxwell (2014/ 2025)
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| #AM 1-01: Thilly Weissenborn Cikelet, West Java c 1920 |
Thilly Weissenborn (1889–1964) was one of the foremost photographers of Java from 1917 to 1942. For more than twenty years, she owned and operated the Lux Studio in Garut in West Java. It was at a time when women photographers were rare.
Born in Kediri in East Java in 1889, she was the youngest of six children to Herman Weissenborn and Paula Rossner, both naturalised Germans who owned a coffee plantation there. When Thilly was little more than three years old, the family moved to The Hague, where she and her older sister Else were sent to learn photography while still attending high school.
Else went on to study in Paris, but Thilly moved back to Java with her brother Theo. After a short stay in Bandung, they moved to Surabaya, where, from 1913, she received further studio training in the famous O Kurkdjian & Co.
For three and a half years, she worked there under George Lewis. Artistically, she differed from Lewis—she was less theatrical—but her own ideas soon came to the fore in 1917, when she was appointed to manage the studio of Garut Pharmacy and Trade Enterprises. She attained ownership of GAH Photo Studio after three years and it became Lux Studio.1
The studio benefited from being right in the middle of the booming tourist industry that had sprung up in West Java and other parts of the Pacific after the First World War. People came to enjoy the scenic views, cool air, craters, sulphur springs, lakes and fishponds. Garut also featured health resorts and hotels that were popular with foreign visitors.
Among the many beautiful landscapes that Thilly photographed was the Cimanuk River, which runs like a silver ribbon through a wide plain, and the majestic mountain known as Cikurai. She also made portraits, and recorded local art objects, including temples.
A favourite subject was the young Balinese women dancers who performed in the many local festivals. Weissenborn’s sense of affinity with these women is suggested by the lavish attention she paid to their costumes, jewellery, delicate facial features and graceful body movements.
The landscapes and outdoor scenes showing people were originally made for Weissenborn’s personal interest, but many ended up in important Dutch East Indies travel books.
As Weissenborn was well known to travellers through these travel publications, she had little time, or need, for art salon promotion. However, few of these books were published in English, which contributed to her eventual eclipse outside archives in the Netherlands. Indeed, the only book in English to feature her work extensively was JZ van Dyck’s 300-page Garoet en omstreken: zwerftochten door de Preanger (Garut and surroundings: rambles through Preanger) of 1922.2 |
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| #AM 1-02: Thilly Weissenborn A beauty of Bali c1925 |
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Stylistically, it is clear that Weissenborn was influenced by the Kurkdjian studio, but aspects of her work also suggest knowledge of the Clarence White School of Pictorialist photography, which emanated from New York. The former emphasised classical compositions and clarity, while the latter emphasised the importance of injecting mood and atmosphere into images.
White’s specialty was light, which also fascinated Weissenborn. Her nephew, photographer Ernst Drissen, called her a ‘calligrapher with light’.3 According to him, she knew how to represent the light by working tonal contrasts into her subjects and printing on special papers. At the height of her career, Weissenborn received commissions from scientists, government agencies, private individuals, businesses, book publishers, magazines and the tourist industry.
Over the years, she built up a formidably large archive of negatives and inventory, most of which was destroyed in the large fire that swept through Garut following the Japanese army’s surrender in 1945.4 Her surviving works are the photographs made for clients in earlier times and the few glass plates and rolls of negatives she kept in her possession until the 1950s.5
Indonesia officially gained independence in 1949, and Weissenborn and her husband Nico Wijnmalen made the difficult decision to return to Europe in 1956. They settled in Baarn, a small town in Holland, where Weissenborn died in 1964, aged 75.
Weissenborn remains poorly known but takes her place as equal to her better known American and German contemporaries Imogen Cunningham and Hedda Hammer Morrison, who worked respectively in California, China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, and among the small band of the first generation of women professional photographers in Asia.
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| #AM 1-03: Lux Studio Bali c 1925 |
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#AM 1-04: Thilly Weissenborn Kuta Beach 1920s in Bali c 1925 |
Footnotes
- Ernst Drissen, Vastgelegd voor later: Indische foto’s (1917–1942) van Thilly Weissenborn, Sijthoff, Amsterdam, 1983, pp 11–2.
- JZ van Dyck, Garoet en omstreken: zwerftochten door de Preanger, Kolf & Co, Jakarta, 1922.
- Drissen, Vastgelegd voor later, p 9.
- Weissenborn was interned in a number of Japanese prisoner of war camps during the Second World War. The fire that destroyed the Lux Studio occurred in the chaotic Bersiap period that followed the Japanese surrender. ‘The Dutch soldier and amateur photographer W. Viallé rescued 48 glass negatives’, which are now in the Tropenmuseum collection. See Anouk Mansfeld, ‘Thilly Weissenborn (1889–1964)’, in J van Dijk, R Jongmans and others, Photographs of the Netherlands East Indies at the Tropenmuseum, KIT Publishers, Amsterdam, 2012, p 28.
- The Tropenmuseum also received an album from Weissenborn’s estate thought to be of stock photographs from her studio.
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