A Changing Scene

Abstract

This paper examines the changing scene of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial photography in the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia). The mid-nineteenth century collection of Woodbury & Page Photographers Java gives us insight into a mixing of vernacular and European architectural languages as experimented with in numerous buildings and colonial settlements throughout the archipelago. A prolific commercial studio, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java was established in Batavia in 1857 by two Englishmen, Walter Woodbury and James Page, following their brief and unsuccessful stay in Australia. Contrastingly, the early twentieth-century photography of the Dutch architect Pieter A. J. Moojen is dominated by the framing of a seemingly contained, pure and exotic indigenous architectural otherness constantly championed in lieu of the rapidly modernising and Europeanised urban settlements in other parts of the colony. The two generations of colonial photographers and the changing architectural scenes captured through their lenses represent a complex landscape of built forms, colonial society and colonial agency in the Indies. This change of scene also signals the rise of the dominant tradition of twentieth-century architectural historiography in the colony and, subsequently, Indonesia. This tradition is governed by a certain way of seeing, a selective visual framing of indigenous built forms as “traditional” and “authentic” other, an exotic antithesis of the modern colonial architectural movement, while marginalising the archipelago's shifting cosmopolitan architectural landscape.