1 See The colonising camera: Photographs in the making of Namibian history, ed. Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Sylvester and Patricia Hayes (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998). See also Colonialist photography: Imag(in)ing race and place, ed. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (New York: Routledge, 2002). The claims of indigenous populations to social representation became more demanding during and after decolonisation as the photographic studio portrait, despite its standardisation and aesthetic and conceptual references to the colonial past, would ‘become part and parcel of the newly formulated notions of citizenry and nationess’. Supartono, Alexander, ‘Post-colonial photo studio’, in Action Field Kodra, ed. Tramboulis, Theophilos (Thessaloniki: Kodra; Thessprint S.E., 2012), p. 176Google Scholar.

2 See Modest, Wayne, ‘Museums and the emotional afterlife of colonial photography’, in Uncertain images: Museums and the works of photographs, ed. Edwards, Elizabeth and Lien, Sigrid (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 21–42Google Scholar; and Edwards, Elizabeth and Mead, Matt, ‘Absent histories and absent images: Photographs, museums and the colonial past’, Museum and Society 11, 1 (2013): 19–38Google Scholar.

3 Anne Maxwell demonstrates the role of exhibiting photographs from the colony in the metropoles in the formulation of European identity in Colonial photography and exhibitions: Representations of the ‘native’ and the making of European identities (London: Leicester University Press, 1999). For a discussion of the presence of photographs from Dutch colonies in different world exhibitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Bloembergen, Marieke, Colonial spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies at the World Exhibitions, 1880–1931 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

4 Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Postmodernism/postcolonialism’, in Critical terms for art history, ed. Nelson, Robert and Shiff, Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 307–22Google Scholar; Foster, Hal, ‘An archival impulse’, October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manoff, Marlene, ‘Theories of the archive from across the disciplines’, Libraries and the Academy 4, 1 (2004): 9–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Batchen, Geoffrey, Photography's objects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1997)Google Scholar.

6 Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart, Janice, ‘Introduction: Photographs as objects’, in Photographs, objects, histories: On the materiality of images, ed. Edwards, E. and Hart, J. (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Gooding, Janda, ‘Physical to virtual’, in The versatile image: Photography, digital technologies and the Internet, ed. Moschovi, Alexandra, McKay, Carol and Plouviez, Arabella (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), p. 161Google Scholar.

8 See, for instance, the international conference ‘Archives 3.0: Archiving the past, anticipating the future’, National Media Museum, Bradford, 24–26 Nov. 2014; programme and abstracts available at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20141002130130/http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/Collection/ArchivesConference (accessed 23 July 2017).

9 See Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value’, in The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Appadurai, A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Engmann, Rachen Ama Asa, ‘Under imperial eyes, black bodies, buttocks and breasts: British colonial photography and Asante “fetish girls”’, African Arts 45, 2 (2012): 46–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Vickers, Adrian, ‘Thilly Weissenborn: The romance of the Indies’, in Towards independence: A century of Indonesia photographed, ed. Reed, Jane Levy (San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1991), pp. 79–85Google Scholar.

12 The style and approach of this photograph is consistent with Weissenborn's portraits of Balinese women. See Drissen, Ernst, Vastgelegd voor later: Indische fotos (1917–1942) van Thilly Weissenborn (Amsterdam: Sijthoff, 1983), pp. 95–9Google Scholar. Anne Maxwell suggests that Weissenborn was influenced by the Clarence White School of Pictorialist photography in the way in which she used light to create ‘mood and atmosphere’ in her photographs. See Anne Maxwell, ‘Thilly Weissenborn's luminous touch’, in Garden of the East, ed. Gael Newton (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2014), p. 78.

13 Vickers, ‘Thilly Weissenborn’, p. 80. See also Eileraas, Karina, ‘Reframing the colonial gaze: Photography, ownership, and feminist resistance’, MLN 118, 4 (2003): 807–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 The existence of different copies of the same photographs with slightly different selections in different photographic albums substantiate this claim. See for example, Album Bali 1920 (1920, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-660) and Album van Limburg Stirum (1917, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-528).

15 For a discussion of how Bali was mythologised as a heaven on earth, see Shavit, David, Bali and the tourist industry: A history 1906–1942 (Jefferson, NC: Mc Farland & Co., 2003)Google Scholar.

16 The album (Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-160) is one of the five albums donated by Mrs Pietermaat-Soesman. The other four albums are: Souvenir from Poerwokerto and Kalibagor (1880–1900, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-256); Souvenir from Poerwokerto, Kalibagor and Banjoemas (1900–1910, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-259); Views of different places (1890–1910, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-362); and Untitled (1920–1928, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-264).

17 In 2014 the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam) merged with the Afrika Museum (Berg en Dal), the Museum Volkenkunde (Leiden) and the Wereldmuseum (Rotterdam) to form the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen as the national ethnographic institution in the Netherlands.

18 For a discussion of the Ethical Policy, see Cribb, Robert, ‘Development policy in the early twentieth century’, in Development and social welfare: Indonesia's experiences under the New Order, ed. Dirkse, Jan-Paul, Hüsken, Frans and Rutten, Mario (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1993), pp. 225–45Google Scholar. For examples of how photography was used by low-ranking officials who implemented the policy on the ground, see Protschky, Susie, ed., Photography, modernity and the governed in late-colonial Indonesia (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

19 The photograph was presented together with views of landmark landscapes, portraits of local populations in traditional attire performing daily activities, religious and cultural ceremonies as well as views of the sugar and rubber plantations and factories. The Kurkdjian & Co. Photo Studio produced the album (Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-258, Coll. No. 60022654). The 60 photographs in the album, including several photographs of Bali, highlighted important features of Dutch possession and achievements in the tropics.

20 See further Dijk, Kees van and Taylor, Jean Gelman, eds., Cleanliness and culture: Indonesian history (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Derrida, Jacques, Archive fever: A Freudian impression, trans. Prenowitz, Eric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 17Google Scholar.

22 See Melis, Wim, Supartono, Alexander and Swierstra, Sjors, eds., Sweet and sour story of sugar: Sugar in a globalised world (Groningen: Aurora Borealis, 2013)Google Scholar.

23 Nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographers in Southeast Asia criss-crossed borders searching for clientele, hence the archives of former colonial powers in the region share comparable photographic collections. It also justifies the relevance of historical photographs relating to the sugar industry in the Dutch East Indies for regional artists. See Supartono, Alexander, ‘Afterimage: Is there such a thing as Southeast Asian photography?’, in Contemporary photography in Southeast Asia, ed. Shan, Sam I and Supartono, Alexander (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2014), pp. 14–19Google Scholar; Newton, Gael, ‘Southeast Asia’, in Encyclopaedia of nineteenth-century photography, ed. Hannavy, John (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1313–19Google Scholar.

24 The workshop participants were: Yee I-Lann (Malaysia), Dow Waksiksiri (Thailand), Robert Zhao (Singapore), Agan Harahap, Abednego Trianto, Yaya Sung, Rangga Purbaya, Wimo Bayang, Ismal Muntaha, Adytama Pranada, Budi Dharmawan and Setu Legi (Indonesia). At the time of writing (May 2020), Zhao, Harahap and Trianto were continuing their exploration of colonial photographic material.

25 International exhibitions include the Noorderlicht Photofestival in Groningen, The Netherlands (2013), Paris Photo (2013), Art Stage Singapore (2013), the Singapore Art Museum (2015) and the Singapore Biennale (2016), among others.

26 Using photomontage to repurpose archival material has often been used by artists investigating colonial legacies. For instance, Congolese Sammy Baloji punctuated contemporary scenes of the Lubumbashi's industrial landscape with figures of colonisers and colonised subjects in his series Mémoire (2004–06), while in his series Moco Polo or museum of the colonial past (1997–2001), Australian Alan Cruickshank imposed his face on the face of an Aboriginal figure from J.W. Lindt's carte de visite studio portrait series. In this blatant face replacement, Shaun Wilson argues, Cruickshank integrated ‘the absurd brutality of colonialism in nineteenth century photography versus the historical remix of postcolonialism’. Wilson, Shaun, ‘Remixing memory: The copied image in Australian photography’, Photofile Journal 77 (2006): 34–7Google Scholar.

27 See Foucault, Michel, ‘The historical a priori and the archive’, in The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language, trans. Smith, A.M. Sheridan, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 126–31Google Scholar.

28 Wasiksiri moved to Los Angeles in 1976 where he completed an Associate in Arts degree in Film and Photography (1978) and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Radio and Television Broadcasting at California State University, Los Angeles (1981).

29 See Alexandra Moschovi, ‘“So sachlich, dass sie fast fuktional zu nennen ist”: Die Neukonstituierung der dokumentarischen Fotografie als Kunst im Museum of Modern Art’ [‘So factual that it may almost be called functional’: The reconceptualisation of documentary photography as art in the Museum of Modern Art], in Dokumentarfilm Museum Kunst, ed. Katrin Mundt and Eva Hohenberger (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016), pp. 70–93.

30 Clare Veal, ‘Thainess framed: Photography and Thai identity, 1946–2010’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2015), p. 266.

31 Chao Chongmankhong, quoted in Veal, ibid., p. 262.

32 King Bhumibol's recommendation to the executive committee of the Royal Thai Photographic Society, 12 Feb. 1971, as quoted in Veal, ibid., p. 270.

33 A plain, white backdrop was also often used in photographs surveying the facial features and bodies of local subjects for anthropological purposes, as for instance, the local portraits by Francis R. Barton taken in Papua New Guinea between 1899 and 1907, presently kept in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, and another series of Papuan portraits by G.M. Versteeg, taken between 1907 and 1913, housed in the Tropenmuseum.

34 Dow Wasiksiri, discussion with authors, Newcastle upon Tyne, Oct. 2013.

35 Unknown, ‘Studio portrait of a Javanese woman buying fruit from a female market fruit seller’, c.1870–1900, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, Coll. No. 600027239.

36 C. Gründler, ‘Studio portrait of a Balinese female priest with two women during a religious ceremony’, 1910–1914, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, Coll. No. 10003742.

37 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘The colonial backdrop’, Afterimage 24, 5 (1997): 4–7Google Scholar.

38 Pinney, Christopher, ‘Notes from the surface of the image: Photography, postcolonialism and vernacular modernism’, in Photography's other histories, ed. Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 202–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Kassian Cephas, ‘The tram bridge over the Progo River near Sewoe Galoor, photographed from upper stream’, 1896, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, Coll. No. 60030023.

40 Knaap, Gerrit, Cephas Yogyakarta: Photography in the service of the Sultan (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1999), p. 16Google Scholar.

41 See Sabapathy, T.K., Piyadasa: An Overview 1962–2000 (Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery, 2001) pp. 92–4Google Scholar. For a comparative analysis of Piyadasa's and Yee's work, see Yap, June, Retrospective: A historiographical aesthetic in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (London: Lexington, 2016), pp. 249–54Google Scholar.

42 Soon, Simon, ‘High seas of resistance’, C-Arts, 16 (2010): 56–60Google Scholar.

43 Yong, Beverly, ‘Introduction’, Yee I-Lann: Fluid World (Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art, 2010), p. 11Google Scholar.

44 John H. Lamprey, ‘On a method of measuring the human form for the use of students of ethnology’, 1869, quoted in Spencer, Frank, ‘Some notes on the attempt to apply photography to anthropometry during the second half of the nineteenth century’, in Anthropology and photography, 1860–1920, ed. Edwards, Elizabeth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 103Google Scholar.

45 In her series Orang Besar (2010) (lit. ‘Big Person’, a term used to describe a powerful leader who mediates between the Sultan and commoners), the artist purposely disrupted the male hierarchy of authorship using batik, an artefact traditionally produced by women, to subvert traditional power structures. Yet again, batik is more modern in Malaysia and thus a kind of ‘invented tradition’ that also points to the artificiality of culture. See Anthony Milner, ‘Orang besar, bodies politic and political struggle in Malaysia’, in Yee I-Lann: Fluid world, p. 141.

46 Yee I-Lann, ‘Artist statement’, in Tramboulis, Action Field Kodra, p. 188.

47 Yong, ‘Introduction’, in Yee I-Lann: Fluid world, p. 9.

48 Yee I-Lann, ‘Horizon’, in ibid., p. 69.

49 Carl and Frederick Dammann's album Anthropologisch-Ethnologisches album in Photographien published in Germany between 1873 and 1876 is an early example of recontextualisation of anthropological and commercial photographs for the juxtaposition of racial types. To achieve uniformity, the background of the photographs was retouched. Elizabeth Edwards claimed that the repetition of specific types of images projected a certain kind of truth value on these photographs, presenting them as paradigmatic models. See Edwards, E., ‘Some problems with photographic archives: The case of C.W. Dammann’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 13, 3 (1982): 257–61Google Scholar.

50 See, for instance, Album with photographs from the Dutch East Indies (1860–1900, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-356, Coll. No. 60005077) and Souvenir de voyage (1870–1892, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, ALB-237, Coll. No. 60008096).

51 Bate, David, ‘Photography and the colonial vision’, Third Text 7, 22 (1993): 81–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 See Moschovi, Alexandra, ‘Distance and proximity’, in The Changing faces commission project 2005/2006, ed. Moh, Alex, exhibition catalogue (Kuala Lumpur: National Gallery of Malaysia, 2007), pp. 24–35Google Scholar.

53 In 2009, the series was included in CUT 09 Figure: New photography from Southeast Asia, organised by Valentine Willie Fine Art and toured in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Harahap's work was selected again for CUT 10. See Eva McGovern, ‘Through the looking glass’, curatorial essay for Parallel Universe: Cut2010 New Photography from Southeast Asia, http://www.vwfa.net/CUT2010/essay.html (accessed 8 May 2017). In 2012 Harahap quit his job to concentrate on his art in Yogyakarta, the centre for contemporary art in Indonesia.

54 See Mia Fineman, Faking it: Manipulated photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012).

55 See also Alexandra Moschovi and Alexander Supartono, ‘Cultural antinomies, creative complicities: Agan Harahap's digital hoaxes’, in The Routledge international handbook of new digital practices in galleries, libraries, archives, museums and heritage sites, ed. Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn and Steven Cooke (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 227–40.

56 Agan Harahap, ‘Super Hero: I love history’, Flickr page, https://www.flickr.com/photos/31199746@N02/sets/72157622452249309/ (accessed 8 May 2017).

57 Daphne Denis, ‘Superheroes at super moments in history’, The Photo Blog, Slate, 30 Jan. 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/01/30/agan_harahap_using_superheroes_to_create_a_superhistory_photos.html (accessed 8 May 2017).

58 It is only recently that Indonesian artists and photographers have begun to explore material from the colonial period. Key studies, such as Anneke Groeneveld's Toekang potret: 100 jaar fotografie in Nederlands Indie 1839–1939 [100 years of photography in the Dutch Indies 1839–1939] (Rotterdam: Museum voor Volkenkunde, 1989), and Asser, Saskia and et al. , Isidore van Kinsbergen: Fotopionier en theatermaker in Nederlands-Indië [Isidore van Kinsbergen: Photo pioneer and theater maker in the Dutch East Indies] (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005)Google Scholar, were published in the Netherlands and not widely distributed in Indonesia. The history of Indonesian photography was, until recently, not extensively taught in art schools such as the Jakarta Art Institute and the Indonesian Art Institute in Yogyakarta. Similarly, exhibitions of colonial photographs have been rare, and usually based on reproductions, due to conservation issues.

59 See Bosma, Ulbe and Raben, Remco, Being Dutch in the Indies: A history of creolisation and empire, 1500–1920 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), pp. 31–53Google Scholar.

60 See Alexander Supartono, ‘Re-imag(in)ing history: Photography and the sugar industry in colonial Java’ (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 2015), pp. 98–140.

61 Dogs were regarded in Javanese culture as guard or hunting dogs. Javanese kings had dogs fed to their captive tigers. See Wessing, Robert, ‘A tiger in the heart: The Javanese rampok macan’, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 148, 2 (1992): 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A former nanny of a Dutch family recalled having to care in the same way for her master's children and pet dogs: ‘both were fed milk, taken for walks and given baths’. Stoler, Ann Laura and Strassler, Karen, ‘Memory-work in Java: A cautionary tale’, in Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule, ed. Stoler, A.L. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 The People of India project (1868–75) is an example of how the British colonial administration's need to survey and classify its subjects informed colonial ethnography, and more specifically the ‘type’ studio portrait. See John Falconer, ‘“A pure labor of love”: A publishing history of The People of India’, in Hight and Sampson, eds., Colonialist photography, pp. 51–83. On the growing scholarly interest on the production and reception of colonial postcards, see Goldsworthy, Patricia, ‘Image, ideologies and commodities: The French colonial postcard industry in Morocco’, Early Popular Culture 8, 2 (2010): 147–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Life, Allan, ‘Picture postcards by M.V. Dhurandhar: Scenes and types of India — with a difference’, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 17, 4 (2001): 401–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 Appadurai, ‘The colonial backdrop’.

64 See McKay, Deirdre, ‘On the face of Facebook: Historical images of personhood in Filipino social networking’, History and Anthropology 21, 4 (2010): 479–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Ibid., p. 487.

66 Ibid., p. 488.