Photographs of the Netherlands East Indies at the Tropenmuseum offers a
comprehensive introduction to one of the most important collections of
colonial photography in the world. There is no other collection at the
Tropenmuseum that is so closely tied to the history of the institute
itself. Photographs were already being collected in the late 19th
century and have been continuously supplemented with new images to
create the broadest possible perspective of topical developments in the
Netherlands East Indies. After Indonesia declared its independence in
1945, the importance of the collection of historic photographs declined
and it was consigned to obscurity. Interest in the collection blossomed
again later when a large group of people in the Netherlands came to view
them as reflecting a lost and increasingly romanticised world. From the
1980s the collection became a source of historical information and the
subject of wide-scale academic research. This publication provides
insight into how attitudes toward the collection have changed over the
past 150 years and the various ways in which they have been used by the
Tropenmuseum and its predecessors.