TAASA Review Issues

These days, we casually take out our mobile phones to snap and share those special moments with ease and convenience. Technological development has dramatically changed the use, quality and meaning of photography. It’s something we take for granted and everyone it seems is now a photographer. But it wasn’t always like that. During the 19th century photography as we know it was invented, and it quickly became an important tool for Western governments documenting their imperial and industrial achievements in their colonial territories while offering opportunities for commercial and amateur European photographers seeking the ‘exotic’. Photography was also used to catalogue and classify indigenous peoples, often through pseudo-scientific racial theories, to further solidify colonial superiority.

The TAASA 2025 Monday night lecture series ‘Beyond the Lens: Photography in Asia’ has explored the use of photography from its earliest introduction to contemporary times. These talks have provided the stimulus for this dedicated issue of the TAASA Review as it includes contributions from these presenters.

Drawing on a wider range of contributions, this issue aims to investigate more deeply this theme of photography in Asia ‘beyond the lens’. Some authors re-evaluate early photographic documentation by Asia’s colonisers whilst others explore the work of local Asian photographers. What they have in common though, is that they all raise important ethical considerations about representation, authenticity and identity construction in pre- and postcolonial times.

In my article, the deployment of photography into the Dutch East Indies during the mid 19th century demonstrates parallels with the wider history of photography in Asia. The work of Dutch photographer Isidore van Kinsbergen, sent as a ‘scientific photographer’ to document Javanese antiquities, provides insight into the Dutch colonial government’s use of this new technology to record local society and how his images helped shape the visual identity of the Dutch East Indies, its colonized psyche and societal structures.

Singaporean historian Peter Lee exposes the long and complex relationship between photographer, camera and subject in the multicultural environments of port cities where social rules were less strictly enforced among migrant communities. Both posed studio photographs and amateur snapshots betray this diversity of expression amongst the Peranakan communities across Southeast Asia. He asserts that the hybrid nature of both photography and Peranakan identity creates a kind of synthesis between them.

Karen Strassler suggests that photography did not merely record the emergence of a new national identity in post-colonial Indonesia but played an integral role in its formation. Following independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1945 popular photographic practices enabled people to begin to see themselves as modern Indonesians, offering powerful testaments to the optimistic aspirations of postcolonial nationhood.

Sophie Couchman takes a different perspective by examining the surviving work of early Chinese Australian photographers. She concludes that the work of these photographers shows little evidence of being ‘Chinese’ in character. Instead, it was created to meet the needs of the communities in which they lived and worked. Through her research, Sophie has opened up the possibility that being an ‘Australian’ photographer could also mean looking and being Chinese.

Lolita Manukian presents the work of Bangalore-based, multidisciplinary artist Pushpamala N. who re-examines and re-enacts iconic photographs of South Indian women in order to investigate their colonial legacies.  She suggests that Pushpamala N.’s photo-performances question how historical images were constructed, what they left out, and why.

Jeehey Kim introduces a rarely discussed aspect of photography: funerary portraits. Examining the basic concepts underpinning this practice, Jeehey explains that, unlike in the West, these portraits signal simultaneously the immortality of one’s essence in the afterlife and the deceased’s continuing relationship with living descendants. She discusses how the commemorative use of these images has structured national identity and collective memory in East Asia.

Gillian Daniel offers a vivid portrayal of a large industrious workforce, working in the shadows of the productive colonial machine that made Asian ports so profitable. A fuller picture of the colonial-era Southeast Asian maritime world emerges from this closer scrutiny of colonial era photographs which identifies, foregrounds and humanises these workers.

Shuxia Chen and Olivier Krischer discuss how their new publication Wayfaring: Photography in 1950s–1980s Taiwan aims to provide a wider audience with insight into the experience of photography in Taiwan in this period of social, cultural and political transformation.

Finally, we offer two book reviews: Margaret White presents Unseen Burma: Early Photography 1862-1962, an impressive collection of black and white photographs from Thai scholar and collector, Thweep Rittinaphakorn, while Adrian Vickers reviews Bali Photography 1865–1939, in which Scott Merrillees presents his rich and invaluable collection of photographs of Bali in the colonial period.