IIAS Newsletter 44 Summer 2007

Photography's Asian Circuits

Karen Strassler

Accounts of colonial photography in the Dutch East Indies focus on European photographers and exceptional figures like Kassian Cephas, the first (known) native Javanese photographer. Yet photography was not simply a ‘European’ technology transplanted from the European metropole to the Asian colony. Decentring European photographers from the history of photography in the Indies reveals the more circuitous - and Asian - routes by which photography travelled to and within the archipelago.

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