No 30 | 2018 € 18,00

PhotoResearcher ESHPh European Society for the History of Photography

Photographs in Motion.
Circulating Images of Asia around 1900
Guest Editor: Sophie Junge

6 Eva Ehninger
Group Formation. Queen Victoria in India

19 Natasha Eaton
Camera Indentica.
Photographic Rattan and Vagabondage
in Nineteenth-Century Mauritius

33 Stella Jungmann
Imaging Japan in Illustrated Newspapers:
The Role of Photography in Visualizing the
Japanese Embassy in the United States, 1860

48 Sophie Junge
Old Soerabaja – New Soerabaja?
Circulating the Emptiness of the Colonial City

63 Jung Joon Lee

Traveling Images, Traveling Bodies:
Korean War Orphans in Hollywood
and the Rhetoric of Interracial Adoption

78 Taous R. Dahmani
Bharti Parmar’s True Stories:
Against the grain of Sir Benjamin Stone’s
Photographic Collection

96 Sean Willcock
The Aesthetics of the Negative:
Orientalist Portraiture in the Digitised
Collodion Plates of John Thomson (1837-1921)
 Old Soerabaja – New Soerabaja?
Circulating the Emptiness
of the Colonial City

Sophie Junge Introduction

Large numbers of photographs of the former Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies (today,
Indonesia) can be found in archives in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Leiden. The numerous
ethnographical portraits, landscape scenes and city views taken around 1900 bear evidence
to the popularity of the printed photographic image and the interest in the former colony.
A substantial repertoire of images of the colonial harbour city of Soerabaja (Surabaya1) has
also been preserved. In the years around 1900, Soerabaja – in the eastern section of the is-
land of Java – was the largest trading centre in the Dutch East Indies and had a population of
about 150,000.2 The city was a meeting point for international firms and entrepreneurs, mer-
chants and tourists. Photographers, including the German Hermann Salzwedel, also began
settling in Soerabaja in the late 1870s. 3 In addition to portraits and landscape photographs,
city views were one component of the commercial repertoire of their studios. Initial surveys
have revealed the surprising monotony of this canon of images.4 The mass-produced pho-
tographs show only a small selection of motifs that are endlessly repeated. In addition, the
main sights in Soerabaja are taken from a great distance away and are difficult to identify
in the photographs. The images are dominated by an impression of emptiness. In spite of –
or, possibly, because of – this vagueness, the pictures remained in circulation for more than
four decades on postcards, in travel guide books, illustrated magazines and publications,
within the colony and far beyond its geographical borders.

The focus of this article will be on the medial circulation of the photographic views of the
city of Soerabaja that I studied with the aid of the Dutch-language publication Oud Soerabaia.
The book was published by the Kolff & Co printing enterprise in Soerabaja, one of the largest
establishments of its kind in the Dutch East Indies (fig. 1). 5 The author of the 235-page, richly
illustrated, history of the city was Gottfried Hariowald von Faber who was born in Soerabaja
in 1899 and established the Stedelijk Historisch Museum (Museum Negeri Mpu Tantular),
which still houses Faber’s collection of cultural-history artefacts, in 1933. Oud Soerabaia is
considered to be a reliable history of the city and is still resorted to as a secondary source
of information on the city’s economy and history by contemporary researchers.6 So far, no
critical investigation has been made of the book as a historical text-image source and its
colonial publication context – a gap in research that this article attempts to remedy.

Von Faber used a large number of photographs from the period around 1900 as illustrations
in his city history. The way in which he used these historical images is perfectly suited to

1. In the following, I use the old Dutch spelling Soerabaja when I refer to the city
during the colonial period.
2. Cor Passchier, Building in Indonesia 1600-1900, Volendam 2016, 88.
3. Steven Wachlin, ‘Salzwedel’, in: Karin Peterson (ed.), In het voetspoor van
Louis Couperus. Pasoeroean door de lens van Salzwedel, Amsterdam 2009, 112-
118. Also see Gail Newton, Garden of the East. Photography in Indonesia 1850s-
1940s, Canberra 2014.
4. These findings are based on research carried out in the collections of the
Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam and
the University Library in Leiden.
5. See announcement in: Het nieuws van den dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 10
October 1928; Scott Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs,
Singapore 2000, 62. Von Faber published a second volume, Nieuw Soerabaia, in
1936 with H. van Ingen, Soerabaja. In this essay, Oud Soerabaia is considered
an independent work.
6. E.g., see Howard William Dick, Surabaya at Work. A Socioeconomic History
1900-2000, Athens/OH 2002 and William H. Frederick, Vision and Heat. The
Making of the Indonesian Revolution, Athens/OH 1989.

48 PhotoResearcher No 30 | 2018

Figure 1
G[ottfried] H[ariowald] von Faber,
Oud Soerabaia, Soerabaja: Kolff & Co. 1931,
cover.
investigate the circulation process of photographs. In my analy-
sis, I study von Faber’s reproduction of the photographic mate-
rial from 1900 at the moment of its medial circulation around the
year 1930.7 My approach is based on Arjun Appadurai’s material-
theoretical considerations on the “social life of things” and I ques-
tion the dynamics of the distribution of pictures.8 Patricia Spyers
and Mary Margaret Steedly have developed useful investigation
criteria for the analysis of images in movement: In addition to the
media through which the images circulate, the focus of attention
is placed on the political potential of city views at the moment of
their reproduction and in the historical conditions of their circu-
lation.9 Geoffrey Batchen also underlines the “politically charged
capacity that can be either exploited or suppressed but should
definitely not be ignored” of the reproduction of photographs.10
Following Batchen’s argument, the emptiness in the photographs
of Soerabaja can be equated with the – representative, historical
and political – suppression of the Indonesian people. As a result of
their supposed banality – the non-specific representation of the
city – the images veil colonial hierarchies and challenge the mod-
els of interpretation of postcolonial theories: The supposedly less
colonial views of the city cannot be localised in unambiguous bi-
narity constructions and research has so far paid little attention to
them. However, the decolonisation is relevant for the perception
of Dutch colonisation seeing that the political potential of the pho-
tographs lies in what they do not show and, in this way, have erased from the cultural memory
over time. Finally, studying the city views of Soerabaja that are in circulation expands the re-
search into the history of photography in the Dutch East Indies that is mainly concentrated on
the activities of individual photo studios and the context under which the photographs were
created in the colony.11 It has little methodological relevance for the images that have been to
be reproduced here, as the photographs of Soerabaja are neither singular nor original, nor can
they be attributed to a specific photographer. From the aspect of circulation, they cannot be
questioned according to the image quality defined by art history and – precisely for this reason
– they productively challenge the canonical methods of art-historical image analysis.

7. I have been making a comprehensive investigation of the medial and geo-
graphic circulation of images from Southeast Asia since 2016 for my habili-
tation project Iconic Distance: Fotografien aus Südostasien in transkultureller
Zirkulation um 1900.
8. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction. Commodities and the Politics of Value’,
in: Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural
Perspective, Cambridge, Mass. 1986, 9 and 13.
9. Patricia Spyer and Mary Margaret Steedly, ‘Introduction. Images that Move’,
in: Patricia Spyer and Mary Margaret Steedly (eds.), Images That Move, Santa
Fe 2013, 3-39, 9.
10. Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Double Displacement. Photography and Dissemination’,
in: Thierry Gervais (ed.), The ‘Public’ Life of Images, Cambridge 2016, 51-85,
52-53.
11. See Alexander Supartono, ‘Other Pictures. Vernacular (Hi)Stories from the
Photo Albums of Dutch Industrialists in Colonial Java’, in: Noorderlicht. The
Sweet and Sour Story of Sugar, 2012. <https://issuu.com/bintphotobooks/docs/
boek_suiker> (15.06.2018); Susan Legêne and Janneke van Dijk (eds.), The
Netherlands East Indies at the Tropenmuseum. A Colonial History, Amsterdam
2011; Gerda Theuns-de Boer and Saskia Asser, Isidore van Kinsbergen.
Fotopionier en theatermaker in Nederlands-Indië, Zaltbommel and Leiden 2005.

49 PhotoResearcher No 3 0 | 2 018
 Figure 2
G[ottfried] H[ariowald] von Faber,
Oud Soerabaia, Soerabaja: Kolff & Co. 1931,
pages 48–49.
The city’s repertoire of images
Oud Soerabaia was aimed at a European audience of resident entrepreneurs, colonial officials
and tourists who visited Soerabaja as the starting point of a tour to the volcanoes in the
east of Java, as well as at readers far away in the Netherlands. In his city history, von Faber
describes the urban and economic development of the city, the various ethnic groups living
there, the legal system and the colonial administration policy. His observations are illus-
trated with black-and-white halftone prints of drawings, paintings and maps from the 17th
and 18th centuries and – above all – a large number of captioned photographs placed in the
text or printed as full-page series of images.

Von Faber described the appearance of Soerabaja in the chapter “Picture of the City” (“Het
stadsbeeld”, Oud Soerabaia, 48–59, fig. 2) in which he integrates the main sights of the colonial
town into the narration of a stroll through the city as it was in 1900. He writes in a graphic,
metaphorical language and makes use of scenic depictions to catch the vitality of the city.
His text is written in the past tense and follows a conventional route through the city as
described in many of the tourist guides that had been published since the 1890s.12 He also
used well-known views of the city for his visual representation and confirmed the existing
place-image of Soerabaja that had existed since the turn of the century.13 Von Faber restrict-
ed the period of his observations to 1906, the year in which Soerabaja was recognized as an

12. E.g., see J .F. Van Bemmelen and G.B. Hooyer, Reisgids voor Nederlandsch- 13. 43 of the 46 photographs are printed in landscape format and adapted to
Indië, Amsterdam 1902, 68-72 and Vereeniging Touristenverkeer Weltevreden, the two-column text setting. Only the panoramic view of the Kali River (Oud
Illustrated Guide to East Java, Batavia 1910, 81-89. Rudy Koshar describes Soerabaia, 51) is spread over two columns and is the exception to the small-
guidebooks as “practical, ‘objective’ and standardized to meet the require- format reproductions.
ments of commodified leisure migration in the age of industrial capitalism.”
(Rudy Koshar, ‘’What Ought to Be Seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National
Identities in Modern Germany and Europe’, in: Journal of Contemporary History,
vol. 33, no. 3, July 1998, 323-340, 326).

50 PhotoResearcher No 30 | 2018
 Figure 3
Unknown photographer,
The Harbor of Soerabaja, half-tone print,
reproduced in: G.H. von Faber, Oud Soerabaia,
Soerabaja: Kolff & Co. 1931, page 48.

Figures 4 & 5
Unknown photographer,
The Chinese Quarter, two half-tone prints,
reproduced in: G.H. von Faber, Oud Soerabaia,
Soerabaja: Kolff & Co. 1931, pages 52 and 53.

individual community and was no longer governed by the colonial au-

thorities in Batavia (Oud Soerabaia, V).14 In spite of that, photographs from
the 1920s and 1930s were combined with historical ones from 1900. With
their detailed captions, which provide information on the approximate
time the images were captured and identify the buildings, streets and
neighbourhoods, these photographs are not merely text illustrations but
can also be considered representations in their own right. They are print-
ed without crediting the photographer. In his introduction, von Faber
thanks a certain Mr W. Melis for preparing the splendid photographs but
any indication that they were actually taken by Melis is missing.15 The
image rights were obviously not the property of the photographers but
lay in the hands of printers and publishers such as Kolff whose logos took
the place of the photographer’s name in publications and on postcards.
The printers and photo studios in Soerabaja were located in close prox-
imity to each other on the European shopping street Passer Besar (Grand
Market), which simplified the transmission of prints and glass negatives
for the production of printing plates.16 In this way, the networks that were
responsible for the production and circulation of views of the city were
able to guarantee the rapid, uncomplicated exchange of knowledge and
material.17 The question of how strongly involved local workers, who are
not mentioned in the historical sources, were involved in the production
of these images must remain unanswered – this is a problem that always
accompanies any research into images from a colonial context.

Von Faber’s stroll through the city starts at the noisy harbour with the
steam tramway and continues along the busy Oedjoengweg. The descrip-
tion is accompanied by two photographs of the harbour taken from far
away (fig. 3). In contrast to the hustle and bustle described in the text,
they create an impression of tranquillity. Von Faber crosses the Arab
quarter and reaches the Chinese district. He gives a colourful descrip-
tion of festivals and customs and lists a number of ‘Chinese types’, such
as the peanut seller,18 by the Indonesian terms commonly in use at the
time. In this way, he underlines the unfamiliar atmosphere of the city for
his European readers and sets the scene of Soerabaja as an exotic tourist
destination. Two photographs of the Chinese district are not printed in
a direct dialogue with the text but as part of a picture-page (figs. 4 & 5).

14. As the city’s governing authority, the municipal council was mainly con-
cerned with the bureaucratic concerns of European businesspeople and enter-
prises. The interests of the local Indonesian population were not represented
(Dick 2002 (reference 6), 44-45 and 160) and this is also reflected in many ways
in von Faber’s publication.
15. W. Melis was police photographer in Soerabaja, see note in: De Indische
Courant, 25 June 1924.
16. Dick 2002 (reference 6), 12.
17. Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photography and the Material Performance of the
Past’, in: History and Theory, vol. 48, December 2009, 130-150.
18. Von Faber refers to the peanut seller as “baba katjang goreng“, which can
be translated literally as “father of the roasted peanut” (Oud Soerabaia, 50).

51 PhotoResearcher No 3 0 | 2 018
 They give only a vague impression of the neighbourhood itself and are taken from a great
distance and from above.19

The promenade ends in the European quarter; von Faber lists official buildings and sights
such as the Wilhelmina Tower on the river bank of the Kali Mas (Oud Soerabaia, 49). He crosses
the Red Bridge – the connection between the European quarter in the west and the Chinese
and Arab districts in the east of the city – walks past trade offices, shops and the Concordia
Club (“de Concor”), the meeting place of the European elite. By mentioning department
stores and service providers by name, von Faber suggests that there was a modern and luxu-
rious social life in Soerabaja. This long list of European businesses increased in importance
after the isolation experienced during the First World War in which the Dutch East Indies, in
spite of being recognized as neutral, suffered economic losses and inflation due to the inter-
ruption of trade with Europe.20

With his use of colloquial designations, von Faber shows himself to be an insider. His lan-
guage acts as an identification with the European community and strengthens his authority
as an author. However, he resorts to well-known descriptions of the city: The list of busi-
nesses at the end of the chapter is almost identical to that published in the Dutch weekly
newspaper Eigen haard in 1899–1900.21 Finally, the use of an already-existing repertoire of
images explains why the photographs frequently do not correspond with his lively descrip-
tions. While the text attracts the readers’ attention and guides them through the city, the
pictures remain vague and distanced.

Emptiness in the image around 1900

The photographs from the years around 1900 in von Faber’s city history are characterized
by compositional and contextual emptiness that can be interpreted as a political iconogra-
phy. It blends out the presence of Indonesians and promises the European viewer no contact
with the native population. The many years of the circulation of empty images block a criti-
cal confrontation with the suppression of the Indonesian people living in the city. Brenda
Yeoh draws attention to the fact that the perception of colonial cities in Southeast Asia has
always been characterized by economic factors and that any social conflicts have been fun-
damentally ignored; this applies to research made into the colonial history of Southeast
Asia, as well as the appearance of Soerabaja in von Faber’s history of the city. 22 The local
population cannot be seen in the photographs; however, a social relationship between locals
and Europeans is construed in the images.23 This representational emptiness will be dem-
onstrated by taking the photograph of Grimm’s Restaurant, the main sight on the Grand

19. The text and images were also separated from each other in illustrated
magazines from the period around 1900. Von Faber’s representations of the city
therefore confirm well-known viewing habits (Hans-Jürgen Bucher, ‘Mehr als
Text mit Bild. Zur Multimodalität der Illustrierten Zeitungen und Zeitschriften
im 19. Jahrhundert’, in: Natalia Igl and Julia Menzel (eds.), Illustrierte
Zeitschriften um 1900. Mediale Eigenlogik, Multimodalität und Metaisierung,
Bielefeld 2016, 25-73, 50).
20. Dick 2002 (reference 6), 59.
21. J. E. Jasper, ‘Soerabaia in vogelvlucht. IV. Slot’, in: Eigen haard, vol. 12,
March 1900, 183-186, 186.
22. Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space. Power Relations and the Urban Built
Environment in Colonial Singapore, Oxford and Singapore 1996, 4 and 9.
23. See Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Cambridge, Mass.
2008, 12 and 20.

52 PhotoResearcher No 30 | 2018

Figure 6
Unknown photographer,
Restaurant Grimm at Passer Besar,
half-tone print, reproduced in: G.H. von Faber,
Oud Soerabaia, Soerabaja: Kolff & Co. 1931,
page 56.
24. Dick 2002 (reference 6), 163.
25. The architecture of the building can hardly be seen in the small photo-
graph. The colonnades and dazzling white façade correspond with a stand-
ardised European colonial architectural style intended to reflect – or create
Market, as an example. Almost identical photographs had been reproduced on postcards
and in publications since the turn of the century – all of them, undated. It can be assumed
that they were shot in the 1880s at the earliest: The gas lanterns that von Faber mentions
(Oud Soerabaia, 55), but which can hardly be seen in the image, were installed in Soerabaja in
1881.24 The nondescript illustration (fig. 6) shows the Grand Market lined with high trees on
the left and right edge of the photograph. The two-storey restaurant can be seen at the head
of the street running to the centre. It is hard to recognize its white neo-Classicist façade
with the columns on the ground floor; if at all, the building can only be identified by the divi-
sion of the floors.25 Four horse-drawn vehicles pass in front of the restaurant, there is some
evidence of a few people strolling beneath the trees – small and faceless, they merely act as
an indication of size and make the composition less monotonous. The camera on the left edge
of the street points slightly down-
ward to the empty thoroughfare
and forces the buildings, people
and vehicles – miniature-like – to
the edge of the image. It is impos-
sible to make out the many shops
von Faber mentions in the text.
Only the caption gives the name of
the restaurant and specifies some
individual stores (Oud Soerabaia,
56). In this way, the representation
corresponds with the main objec-
tive of the colonial city govern-
ment; to bring order and cleanli-
ness into the chaos of the city. The
modernisation of the Indonesian
quarters – so-called kampongs,
which Freek Colombijn and Joost
Coté described as the antithesis of
the modern European city – not
only had urban-planning targets
but was also intended to ‘improve’
the behaviour of the local popula-
tion. Precisely this pedagogical ap-
proach “became the crucial form of
– the colonial power relationship. See Cor Passchier, ‘Colonial Architecture
in Indonesia. References and Developments’, in: Peter J. M. Nas, The Past in
the Present. Architecture in Indonesia, Rotterdam 2006, 97-112, 103; Yeoh 1996
(reference 22).
53 PhotoResearcher No 3 0 | 2 018
 Figure 7
Hermann Salzwedel (attributed),
Three Native Types, half-tone print reproduced
in: G.H. von Faber, Oud Soerabaia, Soerabaja:
Kolff & Co. 1931, page 66.

legitimization for the colonial presence and therefore and important manifestation of the
exercise of power.”26

The emptiness in the image of the city, which eradicates all factors of insecurity, promised
von Faber’s recipients a secure life in Soerabaja: In the photographs, the city is shown as a
European urban space in which an encounter between Europeans and Indonesians did not
take place. Precisely the open area shown in the foreground of many photographs provides
the European colonial society with an empty, controllable space. In the context of colonial
politics in the years around 1900, the availability of this unoccupied space can be interpret-
ed as an invitation to settle in Soerabaja for a long time.27

The city views completely ignore the living environment of the Indonesian population, as
well as their everyday and economic life. The few Indonesians, who are always shown small,
are incorporated into the European-dominated society as workers or servants. The visual
absence of the Indonesians living in Soerabaja reflects the segregation of the city that had
been accelerated since the end of the 19th century.28 After 1900, around 90 per cent of the
Indonesian population – local inhabitants, Javanese and people from the island of Madura

26. Freek Colombijn and Joost Coté, ‘Modernization of the Indonesian City 1920-
1960’, in: Freek Colombijn and Joost Coté (eds.), Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs.
The Modernization of the Indonesian City 1920-1960, Leiden 2015, 1-26, 7.
27. The end of the so-called Cultuurstelsel, a repressive cultivation policy that
forced the local farmers to produce export crops such as coffee, tobacco and
sugar cane between 1830 and 1870, led to the economic opening of the colony in
1870. After that, sugar mills in the hinterland of Soerabaja that had been under
contract to the government were permitted to be run by private Dutch enter-
prises and uncultivated land could also be leased by foreigners for a maximum
of 75 years (Dick 2002 (reference 6), 37-41).
28. The best example of this is the Simpang Club, established in 1887, where
ultra-national Dutch people met (Frederick 1989 (reference 6), 2).

54 PhotoResearcher No 30 | 2018
 off the coast of Soerabaja who had moved to the city – lived in segregated kampongs whose
autonomy had been determined in the administrative rules from 1845. Many kampongs were
originally village communities outside of Soerabaja that had become absorbed by the city in
the course of the 19th century.29 There were formally under the control of the colonial govern-
ment in Batavia (Jakarta) and the city’s administration did not feel that they were responsible
for the concerns of the Indonesian population.30 Although von Faber also mentions the poor
hygienic conditions, the lack of asphalted roads and transport connections in the overcrowd-
ed kampongs (Oud Soerabaia, 80), he avoids illustrating them. The Indonesian districts, with
their foreignness, did not find their way to the front of the (European) photographer’s lens. It
therefore comes as no surprise that a differentiated portrayal of these heterogeneous quar-
ters, where not only the urban underclass but – after the 1910s – a growing middle class with
an interest in European education and chance for advancement lived, 31 is missing.

However, von Faber does devote a separate chapter to the native population (“De Inlanders”,
Oud Soerabaia, 65–75). He portrays their centuries of oppression by the Javanese princes and
praises their improved economic situation as a result of the so-called Ethical Policy that
Queen Wilhelmina had introduced as a new form of imperialist rhetoric in 1901. 32 This chap-
ter is illustrated with two photographs and two drawings. The first photographic image was
made by Hermann Salzwedel who opened a photo studio in Soerabaja in 1879 (fig. 7): It shows
three men sitting on the floor of the studio. They remain anonymous as individuals and rep-
resent – according to the caption – ‘three local types’: in the middle, the owner of a portable
cookshop, with a domestic worker crouching in the left foreground of the picture and a day-
labourer eating out of a small bowl with his fingers in the right background. The depiction
places the men in front of a landscape painted on canvas in the artificial environment of a
European photo studio. As is the case with the empty city views, Salzwedel’s photograph also
prevents the viewer from seeing the Indonesians in the genuine urban space. In this way,
the photograph denies the simultaneity of time and space for the European and Indonesian
population. The political potential of the two representations – the emptiness of the city
and the stereotyping of the portrait – lies in their clichéd trivialization. When dealing with
Soerabaja’s visual repertoire, it is therefore always necessary to question what is visible and/
or what was not intended to be illustrated.

Visible-Invisible: ‘Foreign Orientals’ in Soerabaja

In contrast to the absence of the Indonesian population, illustrations of the Chinese and Arab
quarters were a firm component of the repertoire of images of the city. Von Faber mentions
Chinese and Arab merchants as economically successful actors in the city (Oud Soerabaia, 77)

29. Freek Colombijn and Abidin Kusno, ‘Kampungs, Buitenwijken and Kota
Mandiri. Naming the Urban Fringe on Java, Indonesia’, in: Richard Harris and
Charlotte Vorms (eds.), What’s in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries,
Toronto, Buffalo and London 2017, 152-172, 152.
30. Passchier 2016 (reference 2), 153-154.
31. Frederick 1989 (reference 6), 12-15 and 17-24.
32. In keeping with this rhetoric, the colonial government supported the de-
velopment of the infrastructure, health care and education, as well as the
increased control of the local population by a European-dominated bureau-
cracy. E.g., see Susie Protschky, ‘Camera Ethica. Photography, Modernity and
the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia’, in: Susie Protschky, Photography,
Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia, Amsterdam 2015, 11-40.

55 PhotoResearcher No 3 0 | 2 018
 and, in this way, differentiates them from the Indonesian popu-
lation whose lack of success he attributes to their sluggish dis-
position (Oud Soerabaia, 67).

Chinese and Arabs from the Middle East were legally catego-
rized as so-called foreign Orientals (“vreemde oosterlingen”)
in the Dutch East Indies and assigned to specific quarters in
the city in Soerabaja. The classification system, which was in-
troduced in 1845, differentiated between Europeans, foreign
Orientals and natives and defined the social status of persons
qua origin. 33 Chinese and Arabs had a higher legal status than
the endemic population. In the years around 1900, many of the
Chinese who had been born on Java had become part of the eco-
nomic elite on account of their success in business or by marry-
ing into a Javanese noble family. 34

They had an ambivalent relationship to the Europeans in the

Figure 8
Hermann Salzwedel, A Chinese Metalworker,
1877–1890, half-tone print reproduced in:
G.H. von Faber, Oud Soerabaia, Soerabaja:
Kolff & Co. 1931, page 77.
Dutch East Indies: On the one hand, the colonial government
treated many Chinese who had achieved a higher social stand-
ing with respect and European businesses operating locally had to rely on Chinese merchants
as mediators between the various ethnic groups in Soerabaja. On the other hand, in order to
make the dominance of colonial power visible, the Chinese residents of the city were strictly
controlled on account of their ethnic foreignness, had only been permitted to live in desig-
nated areas since 1866, and had to carry their passports with them at all times after 1863.35

This ambivalence is also reflected in their representation in von Faber’s book: The illustra-
tion of their quarters confirms their presence in the urban sphere and places them on the
same level as Europeans as respectable Soerabajans. The author goes as far as to stress their
economic presence in the captions of the pictures: In the legends of two street scenes (Oud
Soerabaja, 52 and 57), he explicitly identifies the small figures in the photographed urban
sphere as Arab and Chinese merchants.

However, in order not to jeopardise the impression of safety, limiting their living space to
specific districts was also stressed in the captions. The fact that Chinese were allowed to

33. Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘By Way of a Prologue and Epilogue. Gender,
Modernity and the Colonial State’, in: Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Women and the
Colonial State. Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies 1900-
1942, Amsterdam 2000, 13-48, here 19. The ethnic origin – which, however, was
not only determined biologically, but also based on cultural and social hierar-
chies – was valid for the group assignment. For example, Japanese who had
settled in Soerabaja were counted among the group of Europeans as – from the
Dutch perspective – their homeland was considered an important reference
for modernization in Asia and subsequently as a supporter of the European
ideals of modern times (Bart Luttikhuis, ‘Beyond Race. Constructions of
“Europeanness” in Late-Colonial Legal Practice in the Dutch East Indies’, in:
European Review of History, vol. 20, no. 4, 2013, 539-558, 546).
34. Siem Tjong Han, ‘Chinese Correspondence in Dutch East Indies 1865-1949’,
in: Wacana, vol. 18, no. 2, 2017, 343-384, 246 and 253.
35. Karen Strassler, Refracted Vision. Popular Photography and National
Modernity in Java, Durham and London 2010, 131; Johannes Widodo, ‘The
Chinese Diaspora’s Urban Morphology and Architecture in Indonesia’, in: Nas
2006 (reference 25), 67-72, 69.

56 PhotoResearcher No 30 | 2018
 Figure 9
Unknown photographer,
The Red Bridge in 1890 and 1930,
two half-tone prints reproduced in:
G.H. von Faber, Oud Soerabaia, Soerabaja:
Kolff & Co. 1931, page 52.
move to other parts of the city after 1919 is missing in the text and pictures. Conflicts of
the period with the Chinese populace, such as the confrontations during the Chinese New
Year’s festivities in 1912, which led to protests, arrests and the boycott of Chinese shops, are
also masked by the timeless depictions of the Chinese quarters and, in this way, extruded
from memory. 36 The exotic strangeness of the Chinese population is amplified in another
photograph taken by Hermann Salzwedel (Oud Soerabaia, 77): As in the staged portrait of the
Indonesians, the picture shows two men sitting on the floor of the studio in front of a paint-
ed landscape (fig. 8). The caption identifies them as Chinese locksmiths and stresses their
typical appearance with their long braids. This portrayal also removes the men from the
city into the timelessness of the photo studio and dissolves the representative difference be-
tween the Chinese and Indonesian population. In both photographs, the non-European city
dwellers are homogenized according to their stereotypes and subordinated to the Europeans
in an undifferentiated manner. The ambivalent social status of the Chinese and their com-
plex relationship to the European elite is therefore reflected in the genres of the studio por-
trait and city view. It is necessary to resort to both to make the non-European population of
Soerabaja visible and fully understand the city as a social space.
36. Marieke Bloembergen, ‘The Dirty Work of Empire. Modern Policing and
Public Order in Surabaya 1911-1919’, in: Indonesia, vol. 83, April 2007, 119-150,
124 and 135-136.
57 PhotoResearcher No 3 0 | 2 018
 previous page:
Figure 10
G.H. von Faber, Oud Soerabaia, Soerabaja:
Kolff & Co. 1931, pages 52–53.

The stereotype studio portrait ultimately negates the fact that the number of commercial photo
studios operated by Chinese that were established after 1900 increased greatly and that these
actively codetermined the representation of their city. Chinese image makers like Tio Tek Hong,
who opened a printing shop in Batavia in 1902, showed a repertoire of photographs that was
identical to that of those of the European photo studios.37 In the 1920s, the canon of photographs
of the city became more varied – mainly through the portraits of the Chinese and Indonesian
population – but these images never found their way into von Faber’s history of Soerabaja.38

Old and new images of the city around 1930

Von Faber reproduced the historical photographs and combined them with more recent
pictures taken around the time his history of the city was published. In conclusion, repro-
duction as a specific moment of circulation will be focused on in order to demonstrate the
semantics of emptiness in a political context. Von Faber combined the old and new images
on six picture-pages. Five before-and-after sequences show a photograph from 1900 and a
corresponding one from the time the book was published. They invest the place-image of
Soerabaja with a temporality and connect the past and present of the city.

On the first picture-page, von Faber contrasts the historic image of the Red Bridge with a
photograph taken in 1930 (fig. 9). Both are composed symmetrically and show the empty
road leading to the bridge, lined with buildings and with horse-drawn carts being driven
along it in 1890 – the date von Faber gives to the earlier picture – and, 40 years later, with
cars in the foreground. On the left and right of the younger photograph, one recognizes tall
street lanterns. In addition to the increased traffic and introduction of electric street light-
ing, building development had become denser in the 40 years that had passed; the – usually
single-storey – houses built loosely along the edge of the road in the period around 1900 had
given way to a compact row of two- and three-storey buildings. However, they are shown so
small in both photographs that their architecture and function in the urban space are hard-
ly recognizable. Only the image captions name individual buildings and stress the architec-
tural and technological modernization of the city. In addition, there are very few differences
in the composition and arrangement of the old and new images; the photographs make it dif-
ficult to perceive any major changes in the appearance of Soerabaja having taken place be-
tween 1900 and 1930 (fig. 10). Even the direct before-and-after sequences blur the time span
between the photographs. That the population of Soerabaja increased by around 80 per cent
between 1900 and 1925, and the old city had been transformed into an economic centre with
international firms, insurance companies and office buildings, is not shown here. 39 Although
the more recent photographs and their captions give an impression of the present, they

37. Han 2017 (reference 34), 354-355 and 370.
38. Liesbeth Ouwehand, ‘Chinese Photographers and their Clientele in the
Netherlands Indies 1890-1940’, in: Wacana, vol. 18 no. 2, 2017, 315-342.
39. Passchier 2016 (reference 2), 88. Rudolf Mrázek describes the desire for new
quarters in the city not only as a result of the lack of space but also as the “dis-
comfort of Dutch in Indies around 1900”, as the European sections were located
“uncomfortably close to the kampong.” (Rudolf Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land.
Technology and Nationalism in a Colony, Princeton and Oxford 2002, 55).

60 PhotoResearcher No 30 | 2018
 simultaneously underline the continuity of the past.40 The body of images in Oud Soerabaia is
“never contemporary, always past” (Luke Gartlan). In contrast to the representation of the
European quarters, von Faber excludes the photographs of the Chinese and Arab districts
from his time count. The brief descriptions in the captions identify the content of the images
but do not indicate that they are historical photographs. Their potential for development is
obviously of no interest. The timelessness of the non-European quarters – which is intended
to be interpreted as backwardness – is suggested to confirm the European position of power.

The confirmation of a historical repertoire of images stands at the centre of Oud Soerabaia.
With his canonical history of the city, von Faber enshrines the photographs taken thirty years
previously as valid representations and presents them as images of the “good old days.” Their
reproduction functions as a visual frame of reference that confirms the European image pro-
ducers’ prerogative of interpretation that was intended to simulate a feeling of peacefulness
that no longer existed. By doing so, the selection of images eliminates the political conflicts of
the late 1920s when Soerabaja – as the main import and harbour city – was massively affected
by the global economic crisis. The collapse of the sugar industry led to mass unemployment
among the native population and protests by the growing national movement. There were a
large number of union strikes in the first half of the 1920s that were crushed by the colonial
government with the Dutch militia at its side. Thousands of Indonesian workers in the post,
railways and local printing shops were fired on account of supposed Communist propaganda.41
I interpret the visual reference to the past in von Faber’s history of the city as an assurance of
European control and political support for the (barely) existing power structures. It can also be
described as a kind of nostalgia: as “a certain rejection of the past, or at least a certain amount
of discontent with the present” as Caroline Drieënhuizen elaborates for the significance of
culture-historical objects from the Dutch colony.42 By looking back, von Faber achieves a dou-
ble suppression: In addition to the real life of the Indonesian population, the socio-political
reality of the 1930s also remains invisible in the photographs. This falsifying view of the past
and present is intended to suggest a successful future – an aspect that Elizabeth Edwards pre-
sented in detail in her work on English survey photography that is also characterized by a “fear
of the future that would have no sense of its past.”43

Conclusion
The photographic reproductions in von Faber’s history of Soerabaja and the text-image ar-
rangement of the book created a virtual familiarity that catered to European expectations
of a generally valid image of the colony. Not only the representation of colonised cities in the

40. Mrázek 2002 (reference 39), 16.
41. The strikes were organized by the Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union) and
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). However, the development of the
Indonesian national movement was not based on the poor living conditions of
the local population alone. In addition to the wish for economic improvement,
James L. Cobban regards their political and social discrimination by the Dutch
colonial power – disparate legal system, discrimination by the establishment
of private enterprises and lack of access to equal standards of education – as
the decisive motivation (James L. Cobban, ‘Kampungs and Conflict in Colonial
Semarang’, in: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. xix, no 2, September
1988, 266-291, 290–291).
42. Caroline Drieënhuizen, ‘Objects, Nostalgia and the Dutch Colonial Elite
in Times of Transition, ca. 1900-1970’, in: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en
Volkenkunde, vol. 170, 2014, 504-529, 512.
43. Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian. Amateur Photographers and
Historical Imagination, 1885-1918, Durham and London 2012, 23.

61 PhotoResearcher No 3 0 | 2 018
 Dutch East Indies was characterized by the emptiness in the image space in the period around
1900. Photographs of other colonial cities in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore and Bangkok, as
well as European cities, shared this iconography and substantiate the familiar appearance of
the foreign place. A valid canon of images was not the result of a representation that was typi-
cal of the location but of the long years of the distribution of the same images of the city. The
place-image of Soerabaja was the product of the mobility of the images as individual prints and
postcards, and in the context of publications like von Faber’s. In this way, photographs taken
around 1900 developed into iconic images of the city that provided visual confirmation of the
coherence of the Dutch colonial empire as an “all-seeing, all powerful enterprise.”44 The mass
reproduction of photographs not only led to the destabilization of their informative value
but also to cementing their importance as representations of the colonized city. In 1900 and
around 30 years later, the circulating photographs conveyed the image of the city as a control-
lable place in a foreign country. The iconography of emptiness promised a feeling of safety that
was achieved by suppressing the Indonesian population; von Faber also depicted the Chinese
inhabitants stereotypically and timeless in clearly limited quarters.
The circulation of a manageable body of familiar images reflects the desire to hold onto the
late-colonial power constellations and consciously ignore the political present of the 1920s
with its many conflicts. The emptiness in the images therefore has a political significance as
those pictures, which always remained the same, blocked other – non-European – views of
the city that could possibly critically differentiate the Dutch colonial rule.45

Finally, the afterlife of the images could not be restricted to the colonial period: The pho-
tographs have remained in circulation in numerous Dutch archives until today. On the sole
basis of its existence and accessibility, the photographic material we have available to us in
Europe reflects only the European perspective of colonial power and has therefore remained
tied to the ideologies of colonialism until the present day.46 The potency of the Dutch archives
is increased by the emptiness in the official archives in Indonesia that have no holdings of pho-
tographs from around 1900. Indonesia’s national interest in its own (pictorial) history – and,
consequently, the collecting activities of its archives – only begins after 1945 with the strug-
gle for independence.47 So far, I have been unable to locate any Indonesian producer of images
who would be able to provide a (counter) representation of the repertoire of images of the city
from the years around 1900. In spite of the dominance of European archives, the large number
of photographs in circulation should not be ignored. Quite the contrary; only the analysis of
their iconography and knowledge of their publication context can help in revealing the po-
litical potential of the images. On the basis of the existing sources and the emptiness in the
photographs, it is essential to always ask who and what is not represented or even suppressed.

44. Batchen 2016 (reference 10), 75.
45. See Susan Legêne and Martijn Eickhoff, ‘Postwar Europe and the Colonial
Past in Photographs’, in: Chiara De Cesari, Ann Rigney (eds.), Transnational
Memory. Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin and Boston 2014, 287-311, 301.
46. Costanza Caraffa, Tiziana Serena, ‘Introduction. Photographs, Archives
and the Discourse of Nation’, in: Costanza Caraffa, Tiziana Serena (eds.), Photo
Archives and the Idea of Nation. Berlin and Boston 2015, 3-15.
47. See Remco Raben, Wie spreekt voor het koloniale verleden? Een pleidooi
voor transkolonialisme, Inaugural Lecture, 28. September 2016, University of
Amsterdam.

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