Follow my Research on War and Photography
Current project
My current research on war and photography was most recently funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT200100597: ‘Decolonisation and photography in Southeast Asia: Histories and legacies’).
I am currently writing a monograph, contracted to Cornell University Press, titled Seeing Like a Soldier: Photography and Colonial Violence in Dutch Indonesia. It examines the photographs taken by for and by Dutch armed forces fighting wars of conquest and occupation, covering the period between the Aceh War (1873–1942) and Indonesia’s War of Independence (1945–9). The book starts with the origins and development of ‘embedded photography’ in the late nineteenth century, and leads to the widespread practice of amateur soldier photography in the 1940s. The book explains how archives of colonial war photographs have shaped a wider visual culture of ‘seeing like a soldier’ that has shaped narratives of colonialism and decolonisation. Soldiers saw themselves paternalistically, as a force for good in Indonesia; they normalised their sexual exploitation of Indonesian women as benign or necessary; they were highly selective in their representation of themselves as perpetrators of atrocity; and have, over time, converted their wartime defeat at decolonisation into a narrative of sacrifice and suffering that elides their responsibility for colonial violence in Indonesia. How racialised concepts of masculinity informed Dutch soldiering in colonial Indonesia is a line of inquiry that runs throughout the book.
List of my publications on war and photography
‘Rethinking histories of military atrocity, ethnic violence and photography, from the Aceh War to the Indonesian National Revolution’ in Kate McGregor, Sadiah Boonstra, Ken Setiawan and Adbul Wahid (eds), Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality (Canberra, ANU Press), 145-77. OPEN ACCESS
‘The revolution will (not?) be colourised: Photography from the Indonesian National Revolution on social media’, History of Photography, Special Issue ‘Demanding Images’ edited by Daniel Foliard and Sean Wilcock, 47:4 (2024): 344-54: https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2024.2385730
(with Daniel Foliard, Sean Willcock, Pierre Schill, Nancy Rushorora, Alexander L Fattal, Andrés F. Caicedo Sierra, and Elissa Mailänder,) ‘Working with grievous images’, History of Photography, 47:4 (2024): 411-18. DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2023.2431403
(with Bernard Keo), ‘Sovereignty and citizenship at the end of empire: Press images of Indonesians of the Dutch colonial army (KNIL) interned in Australia, 1945–7’, Australian Historical Studies, 54:2, 247-273, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2022.2140813.
‘Burdens of proof: Photography and evidence of atrocity during the Dutch military actions in Indonesia (1945–50)’, Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia/ Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 2020, 176:2-3, 240-78, OPEN ACCESS.
‘Home at the front: Violence against Indonesian women and children in Dutch military barracks during the Indonesian National Revolution’ in Katherine McGregor, Ana Dragojlovic and Hannah Loney (eds), Gender, Violence and Power in Indonesia: Across Time and Space (Routledge ‘Women in Asia’ Series, 2020), 59-83.
‘Soldiers as humanitarians: Photographing war in Indonesia 1945–49)’ in Jane Lydon (eds), Visualising Human Rights (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2018).