Studio portrait of a group 'Papuan men from Netherlands New Guinea dressed as warriors'

Studio
The four men are posing in a studio. The European photographer has placed them against a neutral backdrop. They have been given various objects to make them look more authentically Papuan. Yet on closer inspection, the attributes and clothing are hardly consistent: the sago pounders held by the standing men are from the Sentani Lake region, the bark aprons are from an entirely different area: Bomberai, hundreds of kilometres west of Lake Sentani. The headgear of the standing men, with cassowary feathers, is from the highlands in the interior and the floral decoration of the men resting on their haunches is from Humboldt Bay in the north. The amulets that the men are wearing come from the coast around Cenderawasih Bay (formerly Geelvink Bay). Clearly, this photo was made for commercial, not scientific purposes.

Buyers
Ethnology - especially in the 19th century - was largely an armchair pursuit. Photos like this were sold to anthropologists in Europe. Sometimes they even commissioned studio portraits presenting people with objects from museums or private collections in the Netherlands East Indies. Later, Europeans in the colony bought photos like this to include in their souvenir albums of photos of the Netherlands East Indies. This photo was also published as a coloured postcard, entitled ‘Papuans’.

'Ethnic types'
Photographers of indigenous peoples of the Netherlands East Indies strove to show different so-called 'ethnic types'. So these photos never give the names of their subjects. What mattered was their cultural background. Titles include ‘Marind man’, ‘Papuan warriors’ or ‘Dayak woman’. Studio portraits like these often show the subject at work, engaged in a specific trade, as for example the ‘Chinese locksmith’.

Woodbury & Page
British photographers Walter Woodbury and James Page opened a photo studio in Batavia, today’s Jakarta, in 1857. It continued in business until 1908. They were involved in every aspect of photography: they sold photographic materials, took photos by order and commissioned their own photographers to take photos of the Netherlands East Indies for commercial sale. Photo albums of the period, of which the Tropenmuseum has hundreds, often contain numerous Woodbury & Page landscapes, city views and 'ethnic types'. Indeed, the studio’s photos contributed in a large way to the 19th-century image of the Netherlands East Indies. But as this photo of four Papuans shows: it is not an image to be taken at face value.

22 x 15,6cm (8 11/16 x 6 1/8in.)

Source: collectie.tropenmuseum.nl