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Japanese, such as Mazaraki in Medan, and the Arme-
nians. Of the latter Onnes Kurkdjian (1851–1903), with
a studio in Surabaya, was extremely successful. In 1904
his successors formed a limited liability company, a
trend common amongst many of the larger fi rms at the
time. In addition to studio work, they also sold photo-
graphic supplies, developed photographs and operated
galleries to promote the art of photography amongst
the rapidly growing market of amateurs. Already in the
1850 travelling photographers had offered lessons in
photography. Later in the century most of the established
studios as well as many stores offered cameras and other
photographic supplies and developed the negatives of
their clients who could also use their darkroom facilities.
In 1902 there was even a magazine called the Indisch
Lux published especially for this increasingly important
amateur market.
Steven WachlinSee also: van Kinsbergen, Isodore; Woodbury, Walter
Bentley; Page, James; Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-
Mandé; and Daguerreotype.Further Reading
Falconer, John, A Vision of the Past: A History of Early Photogra-
phy in Singapore and Malaya: The Photographs of G.R. Lam-
bert & Co., 1880–1910, Singapore: Times Editions, 1987.
Falconer, John, Photographs of Java, Bali, Sumatra. 1860s–
1920s, Paris: Les Editions du Pacifi que, 2000 (English and
French).
Groeneveld, A. et al. (eds.), Toekang Potret: 100 years of photog-
raphy in the Dutch Indies 1839–1939, Amsterdam: Fragment
Uitgeverij and Museum voor Volkenkunde Rotterdam, 1989
(exhibition catalogue 4 March–28 May 1989, English and
Dutch: contains an appendix of over 500 photographers/stu-
dios who had worked in the Netherlands East Indies).
Knaap, Gerrit (with a contribution by Yudhi Soerjoatmodjo),
Cephas, Yogyakarta: Photography in the service of the Sultan,
Leiden: KITLV Press, 1999.
Merrillees, Scott, Batavia in nineteenth century photographs,
Singapore: Archipelago Press/London: Cuzon, 2000.
Nieuwenhuys, Rob, Baren en oudgasten. Tempo doeloe-een ver-
zonken wereld. Fotografi sche documenten uit het oude Indie
1870–1920, Amsterdam: E.M. Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1981.
Nieuwenhuys, Rob, Komen en blijven. Tempo doeloe-een ver-
zonken wereld. Fotografi sche documenten uit het oude Indie
1870–1920, Amsterdam: E.M. Quedido’s Uitgeverij, 1982.
Nieuwenhuys, Rob, Met vreemde ogen. Tempo doeloe-een ver-
zonken wereld. Fotografi sche documenten uit het oude Indie
1870–1920, Amsterdam: E.M. Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1988.
Reed, Jane Levy (ed.), Toward Independence: A century of
Indonesia photographed, San Francisco: The Friends of
Photography, 1991 (exhibition catalogue 25 September–1
December 1991).
Wachlin, Steven (with a contribution by Marianne Fluitsma
and Gerrit Knaap), Woodbury & Page Photographers Java,
Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994.
Zweers, Louis, Sumatra: kolonialen, koelies en krijgers [Sumatra:
colonials, coolies and warriors], Houten: Fibula/Unieboek,
1988.INDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHYWhile extensive research has been carried out into the
more populist fi elds of photography—portraiture, land-
scape, architecture and documentary—remarkably little
has been written about the emergence and importance
of industrial photography in the nineteenth century.
Arguably, as in so many other areas of photographic
endeavors, the pioneering vision of William Henry Fox
Talbot can be seen as the genesis of the industrial photo-
graph. Albeit staged and posed—a manufactured image
rather than an observed one– the two-part panorama of
the printing establishment at Reading, England, show-
ing photographers and photo-printers at work, can be
labelled as the world’s fi rst industrial photograph.
Industrial photography as a discipline—as distinctly
separate from the documentation of life and place as it
is from the pursuit of the picturesque—is almost as old
as photography itself. Industrial photography is the ap-
plication of the medium to serve the needs of industry,
of engineers, of manufacturers and of those whose role
it was to promote industrial innovation throughout the
world. If the legacy of Victorian portrait studios informs
us of what our ancestors looked like, then the legacy of
nineteenth century industrial photographers makes us
so much more aware of how their world worked.
Photography was still in its infancy when its future
potential value to industry was fi rst recognised. Early
in the 1840s, the eminent and forward-looking Scottish
civil engineer, Alexander Gorton, proposed to the Insti-
tution of Civil Engineers that photography could soon
serve industry well as a means of recording progress and
change, enabling “views of building works, or even of
machinery when not in motion, to be taken with perfect
accuracy in a very short space of time and with com-
paratively small expense.” That value to industry was
already being exploited before the end of the 1840s, with
the daguerreotype process being used to photograph
machinery, the resulting images being used as sales aid
by travelling salesmen. A number of these remarkable
early images survive in both public and private collec-
tions in the United States. Rare daguerreotypes survive
of examples of early machinery and of manufactured
artefacts. Additionally, early occupational daguerreo-
types survive, showing everything from blacksmiths at
work to chemists in their laboratories, but these must be
classed as occupational portraits rather than industrial
images per se.
Before 1850, photography was, however, being used
to record progress on major civil engineering projects.
Contained within the Getty Collection, dramatic indus-
trial daguerreotypes include whole and half plate views
of a canal lock under construction (c. 1849), although
in the absence of a full understanding of the context
which surrounded their creation, it remains unclear ifINDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
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