Photographic Subjects

'It has taken historians a generation or two to come to terms with empire. Historians who lived during the age of empires tended to put the term imperialism in the too-hard basket. Those who lived through the end of empire appropriately, for the main, took the side of anti-imperialist nationalists. Susie Protschky's Photographic subjects is at the forefront of new studies of imperialism. While not doubting its moral illegitimacy, she explains how the Netherlands' colony of the East Indies imagined itself in relation to the Dutch monarchy. This is a subtle and far-sighted book, analysing photography in relation to royalty in order to show how empire worked. The visual binding of the colony to the mother country was, as she shows, carried out through an array of imagery that celebrated devotion to the absent ruler. Peace and war, tradition and modernity provided a range of sights revealing the nature of colonial subjecthood. This is an essential book for understanding modern Indonesian history.' Adrian Vickers, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Sydney 'A rich, carefully researched and innovative study of photography and monarchy in the Dutch Empire, Photographic subjects is a remarkable achievement. Protschky attends to image-making practices and the materiality of images to yield new insights into the relationship between monarchical authority, imperial rule and photography. Going beyond analyses of official portraits as props in state-sponsored spectacles, Protschky explores how people in the colonies responded to images of the queen though their own photographic practices. She presents an array of figures - colonial officials, local indigenous rulers, middle class Indo-European and Dutch colonists, Chinese associations and Javanese youth groups, among others - who posed next to the queen's portrait, took photographs of royal celebrations in the Indies, sent photographic albums as gifts to the queen, collected postcards and clippings related to the queen, and shared images commemorating royal events with distant family members in other parts of the empire. Photographs, she demonstrates, were not simply proxies for an absent queen. Rather, the queen's physical absence stimulated an array of photographic engagements with her image that cultivated affective attachments to the imperial project she embodied. Spanning a period in which photography transformed from a narrowly elite to a mass technology, Photographic subjects persuasively argues that photography played a crucial role in the formation of imperial subjects and imagined communities.' Karen Strassler, Associate Professor, Anthropology Department, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center 'Photographic subjects is a refreshing, comprehensive study of the articulation of social and political relations in the East Indies during Wilhelmina's reign through visual culture. Protschky uses a novel, broad approach in which photographs serve as a topic, source and prism for looking into the Dutch empire.' Low Countries Historical Review -- .