My mother just received a digital camera. She carries it in her bag everywhere she goes, and often has her pictures taken against the backgrounds of the places she visits, the food she eats, or simply pictures of herself wearing the clothes she has just bought. One day I asked her why she liked being photographed so much. She answered, “Photographs are a way for me to exist forever.”

My mother’s answer also reminds me of George Eastman, founder of Kodak in 1934, who developed an intriguing marketing concept that was summarized in the slogan: “Kodak doesn’t sell film: it sells memories.” ▶12.1

The notion of existing in photography is related to how reality is represented. It is also related to how memories of the past are constructed. During its infancy, camera technology was considered as capable of recording reality perfectly, and photographs were therefore often used as scientific proof. Over the years, scholars have rigorously critiqued these ideas of photographic objectivity. A photograph constitutes a choreographed visual record: to take pictures is to select what one wants to present in a single frame. When a photographer takes a picture, her or she is not capturing reality, but is constructing it instead. ▶12.2

Presented with a collection of photographs taken in photographic studios in the Netherlands East Indies from 1860 to 1940, I tried to focus on how these photographs have articulated reality and memory.