The Immigrant Photographers Who Shaped a Nation’s Image

Born into a poor farming family in southern China, Lie Yie King was just 20 years old when he arrived in the port city of Semarang, on the Indonesian island of Java, in 1920. Within two years, Lie—who had worked in a photography studio in Singapore—opened Chung Hwa (China) Studio in Semarang, followed by at least ten more in the years that followed. His family business, which survived into the early 2000s, was not unique in colonial Indonesia. Across Java, anthropologist Karen Strassler has found that many studios can be traced to Cantonese immigrants who came to Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century.

These Cantonese photographers, who were recognized locally as tukang or craftspeople, dominated the Javanese photo studio industry from the late 1920s onward, as extensive regional kinship networks allowed them to operate their enterprises as family businesses.

Chinese Indonesian photographers like Lie helped envision the modern nation, especially during the 1950s. Strassler argues that they “served as cultural brokers who mediated discourses and practices of global modernity” among Indonesians of different ethnicities. Unlike their colonial-era clientele, mid-century Indonesian customers no longer wanted their pictures taken against European-style backdrops showing flowers or curtains.

Instead, Chinese Indonesian studio operators worked with Javanese painters to produce popular backdrops of local Indonesian landscapes—featuring scenery such as palm trees and volcanoes—with modern instruments like radios and motorboats serving as props. The backdrops proved that “modern architecture, natural tropical beauty, and Indonesian subjects could meet within the same visual space” after the colonial era, Strassler explains.

The resulting images contrasted sharply with those produced by the Peranakan enthusiasts who formed social clubs and salons to practice their craft. Though membership was heavily Chinese, the leaders seldom were. For instance, when the Preanger Amateur Fotografen Vereniging became the Perhimpunan Amatir Fotografie, or Association of Amateur Photographers, in 1954, it elected a pribumi—or indigenous Indonesian—as club president.

Strassler considers this pattern to be “an indication of some of the tensions surrounding the place of ethnic Chinese” in the postcolonial nation. While hobbyists viewed photography as a technology to help newly independent Indonesia modernize, their tastes were influenced by a European preference for images of what Strassler describes as “beautiful rural landscapes and noble, hardworking, picturesque people” that could form the basis of an asli or “authentic” Indonesian nation.

As she explains, they also “gave visual support to an ideology of authenticity that has excluded Chinese Indonesians from dominant constructions of national belonging.”

Neither amateurs nor studio photographers operated in exclusively Chinese ethnic spaces. The former shared their hobby with Javanese aristocrats and other elites, and the latter collaborated with local artisans who supplied the materials to serve Indonesian customers.

According to Strassler, the distinction between the two groups of Chinese photographers is unsurprising: most amateurs benefited from the hierarchy of colonial society, while immigrant studio photographers and their customers “were determinedly upwardly mobile.”

Changing business models led to a major decline in studio photography in Indonesia. Since Lie Yie King’s death in 1967, Chung Hwa has become “a shell of its former self,” Strassler writes.

But the role that his trade played in shaping the modern nation endures.

“The idioms formed in the late colonial and postcolonial period by Chinese Indonesian photographers have remained important strands in Indonesia’s visual and political cultures,” she concludes, “in which an outward-looking, optimistic embrace of global modernity coexists with a romantic nostalgia for an ‘authentic’ Indonesia depicted in lush tropical landscapes and the picturesquely rendered lives of the rural poor.”

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