Chapter 3 - Portraits of Power: From Aristocracy to Democracy

Summary

In colonial Java, photographic portraits of Javanese rulers employed a combination of European and Javanese visual vocabularies to negotiate the colonial power structure while affirming Javanese ideals of power and cosmological order. For the Javanese aristocracy whose royal power was legitimized with reference to cosmological order and alliance with the supernatural world, photographic portraits were used to connect them with concepts pertaining to the ideal and charismatic king as the vestige of cosmological and political stability. ▶3.1 ▶3.2 ▶3.3

After the proclamation of independence on 17 August 1945, Sukarno who imagined himself as the spearhead of an Indonesian cultural renaissance, developed a visual discourse concerned with maintaining meaningful continuity to pre-colonial Javanese culture and Javanese ideas of kingship as a way to demonstrate his legitimacy as the rightful successor. As per his Javanese predecessors, Sukarno combined European and Javanese symbols of status within European pictorial conventions to project himself as the centralising symbol of power and the ultimate social unifier who could guide the country back into a period of cosmological and political order.

In Java, as elsewhere, the advent of photography and the photographic portrait altered the way that portraits and the people they represented were circulated and received. The photographic portrait, in comparison to its painted predecessor, was an easily portable, relatively inexpensive, displayable and exchangeable representation of an individual. By the close of the 19^th century, photography more than any other medium became the preferred mode for visualising and documenting the lives of Javanese people. Yet, when photographers in Java were commissioned to make portraits it was not uncommon for them to borrow classical poses and pictorial devices from the traditions of portrait painting. Lighting, emulsions, papers, exposure times, lenses and even retouching were employed to manipulate the photographic process to imitate paintings. Pictorial props such as the column, the position and posture of the sitter and even the drapery common to both painted and photographic portraiture demonstrate the close relationship between painted and photographic compositional logic in late-19^th century Java.

Although the photographic portrait resembled its painted predecessor, it opened up new avenues for mass production and dissemination and offered something very unique to clients wanting to have their image reproduced.