Photographic Subjects : Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia

'Susie Protschky’s Photographic subjects is at the forefront of new studies of imperialism. Subtle and far-sighted, it analyses photography in relation to royalty in order to show how empire worked. This is an essential book for understanding modern Indonesian history.'
Adrian Vickers, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Sydney

‘Photographic subjects is a meticulously researched, indispensable contribution to the study of photography, monarchy and imperialism. Susie Protschky’s argument that practices of making, collecting and circulating photographs played a crucial role in the formation of imperial subjects and imagined communities across the Dutch empire is powerfully and persuasively made.’
Karen Strassler, Associate Professor, Anthropology Department, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center

This book examines photography at royal celebrations during the reigns of Queens Wilhelmina (1898–1948) and Juliana (1948­–80), a period spanning the zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. It reveals how photographs taken at Queen’s Day celebrations were used to record the ritual functions of royal portraits in the colonies, and how albums became objects of exchange across colonial networks. Royal photographs associated the queens with colonial modernity and modes of governing difference across a discontinuous and ethnically diverse empire. As the book shows, they have strongly gendered and racial dimensions, in that they depict Wilhelmina and Juliana as female kings who related to their Dutch and Indigenous subjects in different visual registers.

Advancing methods in the uses of photographs for social and cultural history, Photographic subjects reveals the entanglement of Dutch and Indonesian histories in the twentieth century and provides a new interpretation of Queens Wilhelmina and Juliana as imperial monarchs.