Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-colonial Indonesia

The essays in this volume examine, from a historical perspective, how contested notions of modernity, civilization, and being governed were envisioned through photography in early twentieth-century Indonesia, a period when the Dutch colonial regime was implementing a liberal reform program known as the Ethical Policy. The contributors reveal how the camera evoked diverse, often contradictory modes of envisioning an ethically governed colony, one in which the very concepts of modernity and civilization were subject to dispute. Cover 1 Table of Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Part I – Governing Lenses on Ethical Policy and Practice 10 1. Camera Ethica: Photography, modernity and the governed in late-colonial Indonesia / Susie Protschky 12 2. Ethical policies in moving pictures: The films of J.C. Lamster / Jean Gelman Taylor 42 3. Ethical projects, ethnographic orders and colonial notions of modernity in Dutch Borneo: G.L. Tichelman’s Queen’s Birthday photographs from the late 1920s / Susie Protschky 72 4. Saving the children? : The Ethical Policy and photographs of colonial atrocity during the Aceh War / Paul Bijl 104 Part II – Local Lenses on Living in an “Ethical” Indies 132 5. Interracial unions and the Ethical Policy: The representation of the everyday in Indo-European family photo albums / Pamela Pattynama 134 6. Reversing the lens: Kartini’s image of a modernised Java / Joost Coté 164 7. Modelling modernity: Ethnic Chinese photography in the ethical era / Karen Strassler 196 8. Modernity and middle classes in the Netherlands Indies: Cultivating cultural citizenship / Henk Schulte Nordholt 224 9. Say “cheese” : Images of captivity in Boven Digoel (1927-43) / Rudolf Mrázek 256 This powerful study examines how contested notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through photography in early twentieth-century Indonesia when a reform programme known as the Ethical Policy was being implemented under the Dutch colonial regime. This is the first work to examine ‘ethical’ ways of seeing through photography, a medium whose proliferation coincided with significant social and political change in colonial Indonesia