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Gregor Krause’s Bali and Borneo
Anneke Groeneveld (2024/2025)
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| #AG 1-01: Gregor Krause Gibbon 1920s, plate X in Borneo, vol 1, 1926 |
Amateur photographer Gregor Krause (1883–1959) was born in Insterburg in East Prussia. After training as doctor in Kaliningrad and Hamburg, he joined the Royal Netherlands Indies Army in 1910 and soon set off to Bali in 1912, where he established a policlinic for the locals in Bangli.
He learned Balinese, studied the religion and culture and documented the traditional Bali way of life, before returning to Europe as a result of the First World War. He lectured on Bali with lanternslides in the Netherlands from 1917 to 1919 and engaged with architects and writers and visited associations of artists in The Hague and Amsterdam.
He published illustrated articles in art and photography magazines such as Nederlandsch-Indie: Oud en Nieuw, Wendingen and Focus. His photographs exhibited in Amsterdam in 1917 received rave reviews in the national newspapers, and he soon became famous for his two-volume photo book Insel Bali, published in 1920 by Folkwang Verlag, the centre of the New Photography movement in Germany.
Insel Bali included four hundred pictures selected by the author, Karl With, and was distributed internationally. It sold out within a year. An abridged version with only 207 images was released as one volume in 1922.
Krause prepared and revised the third edition himself in 1926, which contained writings and pictures by Krause only—the previous books showed some pictures made by his friend American painter Maurice Sterne. A French edition, L’Ile de Bali, based on the third edition, was published in Paris in 1930. Krause’s book appeared shortly after the First World War.
His photographs of the sincere, pure and seemingly simple life of the Balinese stood in sharp contrast to the horrors of wartime, industrialisation and the loss of traditional values and religiosity in Europe. People interpreted Bali to be a serene place, heaven on earth, the Garden of Eden.
However, the nude pictures of bathing men and women caused a stir, but Krause was their doctor and bathed daily with the locals at the communal bathing place. Being classically trained, he also associated the body shapes of the Balinese with Egyptian and Greek sculptures from antiquity.
From 1919 to 1928, Krause was physician for Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij (now Shell) in Balikpapan in Borneo. While there, he spent his Sundays in the rainforest taking pictures. He was the first to photograph the tropical rainforest in Borneo and to show the results of deforestation. His photographs of plants and shrubs are extremely detailed, and he focused on the sculptural shapes of trees.
Krause made a sequential series of intimate portraits of apes, which were displaced because of logging. The portraits were made with a smaller camera and reveal Krause’s interest in cinematography as well as pedagogy. His portfolio Borneo was published in 1926.
Krause’s Insel Bali inspired the next generation of writers, artists and ethnologists to visit Bali, including Walter Spies, Hugo Bernatzik, Jane Belo and Margaret Mead. His images have high contrast, stress forms and lines, textures and movement, and his compositions anticipate the Balinese pictures of Cartier-Bresson in their liveliness. Krause died in Dalfsen in the Netherlands in 1959. Bali 1912, an English edition of Insel Bali, appeared in 1988, arousing renewed interest in his photography.
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