‘Souvenirs from the other side’

The Commercialization of Ethnographic Photographs as Postcards in the Tropenmuseum

For my MSc in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford, l explored the social biographies of photographic postcards from the East Indies printed by the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, since its foundation in 1871 to this day. My aims were to reveal multiple, fragmented, contradictory practices and processes of meaning formation at the Tropenmuseum, thereby raising important anthropological issues such as the social relations that emerge from the production, distribution and consumption of things. 

The picture postcard is a historically loaded and complicated medium due to the juxtaposition of photographic content and the materiality of the object. Based on interviews with curators and researchers of the Tropenmuseum as well as archival work that follows both image and object, I discussed one specific photographic print of an unknown Javanese girl. The social biography of this image spread across impressive periods and ideologies: having circulated as a colonial postcard at the beginning of the 20th century in a brightly coloured hand-painted version, it was sold by the museum between 1986 and 1996 in a sepia version and is currently sold online in a more discrete hand-painted version discovered in Tropenmuseum’s archive. While carrying the colonial semiotic weight of an object that added to the idealization and objectification of Indonesian women, it also makes salient what would otherwise remain obscure, in that the politics of the museum’s institutional frameworks transpire through the analysis of photographs’ biographies. 

You can read the entire dissertation here.