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Table of Contents
Background to the collection and catalogue
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| #00-04: Unknown photographer Javanese villagers riverside studio tableau c 1898 |
(This text has used text from the catalogue's introduction togrether with some from the acknowledgement section)
This is an online version of the publication I worked on at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA). It was my final major project at the NGA. I left in September 2014.
In 2005 the National Gallery had a small holding of less than two hundred photographs from anywhere in Asia; of which only half a dozen were by any Asian-born photographers.
By the time of this 2014 exhibition, the NGA’s Asian photographs collection has grown to nearly eight thousand with in excess of six and a half thousand prints from Indonesia, including over one hundred and fifty prints by Javanese photographer Kassian Céphas. Such rapid growth was facilitated by the acquisition in 2007 of a collection of colonial‑era Indonesian photographs, albums and books from Amsterdam rare-book and print dealer Leo Haks.
The 2008 survey exhibition Picture paradise: Asia-Pacific photography 1840s–1940s was the first of the new Asia-Pacific collection focus exhibitions. In 2010, the Gallery staged an early photographic portrait exhibition to coincide with a conference entitled ‘Facing Asia’ hosted in partnership with the Australian National University.
In 2014 the NGA presented Garden of the East: photography in Indonesia 1850s–1940s, the first art-museum survey of photographic art in the Dutch East Indies over the last century of colonial rule and just prior to the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia in 1945.
The title for this exhibition of over two hundred and fifty works from the Gallery’s permanent collection was taken from the 1897 best-selling travelogue on ‘one of the most beautiful countries of the world’, Java: the Garden of the East by American writer, geographer and amateur photographer Eliza Scidmore.
Like most nineteenth-century authors, Scidmore did not view photographers as artists. Consequently her illustrations made after photographs by the Yogyakarta studio of Javanese Kassian Céphas did not merit an equal credit with the engravers and graphic artists. The attitude to photographic art has changed since the 1890s and Céphas is now acknowledged nationally and internationally and had a prominent place in the NGA’s exhibition, Garden of the East. The full genius of Céphas and the rich heritage of the photographers working in colonial and modern Indonesia was enhanced through the NGA’s collections and focus exhibitions.
As was the case in other Southeast Asian ports, the most prominent professional photographers at work in colonial Indonesia came from a wide range of European backgrounds until the 1890s, when Chinese photography studios begin to dominate. Due regard in the exhibition was paid to the leading foreign studio in particular to Walter B Woodbury, one of the earliest photographers at work in Australia in the 1850s as well as the Dutch East Indies; but also to lesser-known figures whose work embraced the new art photography styles of the early twentieth century.
The latter includes: George Lewis, the British chief photographer at the Surabaya studio founded by Armenian activist Ohannes Kurkdjian; the remarkable German amateur photographer Dr Gregor Krause; American adventurer and filmmaker Andre Roosevelt; and the only well-known woman professional known to work in the period, Thilly Weissenborn, whose works were all intertwined with the tourist promotion of Java and Bali in the 1930s.
Chinese studios in Jakarta are well‑represented, although little is known of their founders and many employed foreign operators. The only Australian known to have worked in Indonesia before the Second World War was the polar expedition photographer Frank Hurley. He toured Java in mid 1913 on commission to promote tourist cruises from Australia to the Dutch East Indies for the Royal Packet Navigation Company
The Indonesian photograph collection
The National Gallery of Australia’s archive of photographs from Indonesia is based on the collection acquired in 2006 from Dutch rare-book and print dealer Leo Haks. The over 6000 prints include some 3000 in albums and portfolios and chiefly date from the late 1860s to the early 1940s, when Indonesia was still known as the Dutch or Netherlands East Indies.
Over my last seven years with the NGA, this large foundation was built upon under the Gallery’s ongoing acquisition program of photographic art from Southeast Asia. The collection chiefly covers the populous centres on Java, Sumatra and Bali with over 1000 images each, while Kalimantan (Borneo), Lombok, Aceh and Yogyakarta are represented with some 100 works each. The remaining locations, including Papua and West Papua (formerly Dutch New Guinea), have scant representation at this point.
The works encompass all photography-on-paper process adopted in the tropics from the 1850s–1940s, including wet-collodion glass negatives, commercial dry plates and versatile roll-film cameras. The formats include tiny carte-de-visite portraits, mass-produced ‘native types’ and large landscape views, many of which are found in albums that range from massive souvenir and corporate albums of agribusiness to cord-tied family albums of both expatriate European and affluent local Indonesian families.
The unique cased earliest images known as daguerreotypes and ambrotypes from the 1840s–1860s are extremely rare and remain, as yet, a wistful hope. All photographs illustrated in Garden of the East from before c 1895 are albumen prints and from after 1900 are gelatin silver prints, unless otherwise stated in the image captions.
My greatest personal gratitude and respect is firstly due to my then Director Ron Radford whose bold vision for the Asia–Pacific photography collection led to the Gallery’s acquisition in 2006 of a large part of the Amsterdam-based Leo Haks collection. Buying such a huge collection required seven years of cataloguing, rehousing, conservation, research, digitisation and promotion by the staff across the whole Gallery. The project benefited from a succession of past and present staff, volunteers and friends of the National Gallery.
Regional scholars will benefit from this visual heritage collection at the NGA through exhibitions and collection displays, online collection search, publications and Collection Study Room service.
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