Putrikinasih Ririh Santoso

Abstract

This presentation illustrates the tentative role of the photographs of infrastructural landscapes in transmitting the colonial imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Batavia (present-day Jakarta). To do so, I anchor my inquiries on the Woodbury & Page photo collections of Batavia from the Canadian Centre of Architecture (CCA) and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). Operating as the only photographer of topographic views in a transitional period from the Cultivation System colonial model (1830) to the Liberal System (1870), Woodbury & Page captured the rise of private investments post-Agrarian Law reform through architectural and infrastructural landscapes photographs of Batavia. Conveying the images of progress to the international public toward the end of the nineteenth century, these photographs of 1870s Batavia were published in albums, sold separately to the public through an advertisement in Java Bode newspaper in 1879, as well as reproduced as souvenirs and postcards. At the same time, Woodbury & Page’s photographs recorded the development of infrastructure (canals, railways, roads) as part of the Dutch’s mercantilism logistic network from the plantations in neighbouring regions to the port of Batavia. This colonial moment of infrastructure building offers crucial genealogical beginnings to the post-independence infrastructural practices in the next stages of the dissertation research.

Author

Putrikinasih R. Santoso is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Architecture HKU. She is studying the relationships between mobility infrastructure and urban development in Jakarta, Indonesia. Putri is a research fellow in the 2022 Doctoral Research Residency Program (DRRP) at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).

↩ Department of Architecture Research Seminar Series Fall 2022