In colonial Java, photographic portraits of Javanese rulers employed a combination of European and Javanese visual vocabularies to negotiate the colonial power structure while affirming Javanese ideals of power and cosmological order. For the Javanese aristocracy whose royal power was legitimized with reference to cosmological order and alliance with the supernatural world, photographic portraits were used to connect them with concepts pertaining to the ideal and charismatic king as the vestige of cosmological and political stability. ▶3.1 ▶3.2 ▶3.3

In Java, as elsewhere, the advent of photography and the photographic portrait altered the way that portraits and the people they represented were circulated and received. The photographic portrait, in comparison to its painted predecessor, was an easily portable, relatively inexpensive, displayable and exchangeable representation of an individual. By the close of the 19th century, photography more than any other medium became the preferred mode for visualising and documenting the lives of Javanese people. Yet, when photographers in Java were commissioned to make portraits it was not uncommon for them to borrow classical poses and pictorial devices from the traditions of portrait painting. Lighting, emulsions, papers, exposure times, lenses and even retouching were employed to manipulate the photographic process to imitate paintings. Pictorial props such as the column, the position and posture of the sitter and even the drapery common to both painted and photographic portraiture demonstrate the close relationship between painted and photographic compositional logic in late-19th century Java.