Familiar Distance Picture Postcards from Java from a European Perspective , ca . 1880-1930

This paper examines the cross-imperial production and reception of picture postcards from the Dutch East Indies. As travelling agents of colonial knowledge, picture postcards helped to circulate and promote the political demands of the Dutch colonial empire. At the same time, the layout and the iconography of these postcards expressed contemporary visual standards and fulfilled European expectations of a successfully governed colony in Southeast Asia. With the focus on one particular set of postcards that was sent from Java’s largest harbour city Soerabaja (present-day Surabaya) to the Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller in Switzerland in 1924, this paper follows the practices of making, buying, sending and receiving these postcards. The analysis reconstructs the cross-imperial business initiatives by diverse actors from the Netherlands and of Chinese heritage in Soerabaja, from Armenia, England and Switzerland and shows how Swiss individuals participated and supported Dutch colonial propaganda as part of a European culture of colonialism.

junge cross-imperial exchange relations. By following the circulation of picture postcards from Soerabaja, this paper discusses the question of access and control of colonial visual knowledge in the Dutch East Indies and in Europe. 9 While research on colonial photography has focused on local adaptations and transnational production networks 10 , the history of picture postcards in particular has often been written as a success story of individual nation states around 1900. 11 A useful exception is Saloni Mathur who states that, with regard to postcards from colonial India, 'postcard production around the turn of the century was an international business, encompassing many large national firms and even more tiny, local operations.' 12 In accordance with Mathur and others 13 , this paper focuses on the joint efforts around 1900 to create and circulate an image of the colonial city Soerabaja.
While the production networks in Soerabaja can be reconstructed, it is more difficult to make statements about the reception of the picture postcards. As travelling media, the postcards sent to Adolf Feller transgressed geographical and formal political borders. Following Arjun Appadurai's thoughts on the reception of moving images, the postcards reached audiences with different cultural and historical imaginaries, as can be proven by their travel routes and by the multilingual inscriptions on their backsides. 14 junge As Deborah Poole has argued, nineteenth-century cartes-de-visite answered shared desires and sentiments of a global bourgeois -and in the case of small and inexpensive picture postcards even larger mass-audiences that did not belong to the bourgeois milieu only -and circulated through channels much broader than immediate networks of friends and acquaintances. 15 The postcards' visual language and their status as mass-produced and standardised commodities bridged distances, languages, and national and social boundaries.
Thanks to photo-mechanical printing processes like collotype or halftone, these small format image objects took the world by storm and reached mass audiences in different parts of the globe. 16 Postcards served as souvenirs for travellers and also as objects to show to close friends and family in order to underscore one's travel experiences with visual representation. From images showing architectural and historical sites to the exoticised and staged photographs of certain stereotypes of peoples, postcards helped shape an overall image of foreign cultures and territories that would otherwise have not been comprehensible nor visible to the so-called 'armchair traveller'. 17

Representations of familiar distance: Soerabaja on the postcards
The ten picture postcards discussed here represent a common repertoire not only of the city of Soerabaja but also of colonial city views around 1900. 18 With their standard iconography, composition, and layout, postcards shaped colonial imagery that fulfilled general European expectations of a colony.
They show the train station, a Buddha statue in the Kroesenpark, European quarters and shopping streets like Passer Besar, the Chinese quarter, and the Red Bridge over the river Kali Mas -all famous landmarks in the city centre. During the first decades of the twentieth century, these photographic representations were reproduced countless times on postcards, in illustrated travel guides, and in magazines. It can be argued that they constituted a validating canon of Soerabaja's place-image by applying European visual knowledge that was most common around 1900.
All the photographs on Feller's postcards were taken from a distant camera standpoint which creates a visual style evoking distance as well as junge familiarity. Figure 1 depicts the Red Bridge from a panoramic perspective.
The photograph is taken from the riverside promenade, far away from the city centre marked by the European architecture behind the bridge and shows the famous landmark only in the back. The centre of the image is occupied by the river, an open space that is formally framed by the promenade on the left and the horizontal bridge in the background. There are no ships or canoes on the smooth water surface while the Red Bridge is crowded with people, carriages, and automobiles crossing between the European part in the west and the Chinese and Arab quarters in the eastern part of the city. However, this lively hustle is difficult to make out in the back of the photograph. Instead, the bustling city is represented here in the far distance while the empty space in the foreground of the photograph gives the impression of Soerabaja as a calm and controllable place. The composition of the photographs thus promised a feeling of security for European recipients; encounters with the Indonesian population were not represented.
The few Indonesians, who appear as small staff figures in most of the cityscapes from the Dutch East Indies, are incorporated into the Europeandominated society as workers or servants. Their living environment, as well as their everyday and economic life, are forcefully eradicated in the pictures -a compositional characteristic that denied Indonesian agency since the Indonesian population was made invisible as inhabitants of the city. The distant standpoint of the camera and the panoramic view of the photographs were common features in the depiction of cityscapes around 1900. 19 In the context of the representation of colonised cities, this compositional feature needs to be regarded in terms of official colonial image politics, especially since the photographs circulated for several decades.
The representations of Soerabaja do not differ much from photographs of other colonised cities like Singapore or Batavia (present-day Jakarta) that show the same distant views. Many photographs from these colonial cities delivered a standard view that needed captions or texts to identify the exact scenes and sights. This lack of specificity and a standard repertoire of recurrent subjects thus generated for Europeans a visual familiarity of this unfamiliar place and confirmed European expectations of a colony (figure 3).
The common framework of the postcard layout -the small format, the black-and-white print and the combination of picture and captionfurther emphasised this familiarity by overwriting the inequality of the colonial space. 20 The comprehensive representation of colonial space

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give us information about the depicted places. This representational style was not reserved for photographs of colonial cities only. On the contrary, the iconography of emptiness, the composed distance and the clear space in the foreground of the images, were used to represent European cities as well, as several picture postcards from the Feller collection show. 21 The depiction of European architecture takes on a civilising function and evokes a European atmosphere that visually diminished differences between colony and metropole. 22 The representation of Soerabaja thus promised safeness, sameness, and the comforts of home, presenting the colonial city as a modern European place where Europeans could settle and feel like home.     Little is known about this person 'K.', who sent the postcards from Soerabaja to Feller. However, these cards were not the only ones that Feller received from the Dutch East Indies. Twenty-seven of the thirty-four postcards from Java were sent to Horgen and signed by a certain 'K.', a 'Khouw', a 'K. K.
Khouw' and a 'K. K. Khouw, Mr Cornelis' between 1920 and1924. It is safe to assume that the postcard set from Soerabaja was sent by the same person, but who was 'K. K. Khouw' and how was he or she connected to Feller? The professional stamper on eleven cards from the Feller collection indicates that his or her business was located in Meester Cornelis (present-day Jatinegara), a suburb of Batavia. 27 Six cards were actually sent from Meester Cornelis as the postmarks prove; another thirteen were sent from Soerabaja and four from Weltevreden, another residential area in Batavia. 28 The systematic mailing junge of postcards on the same day, the fact that they were sent in series -as the numbering on every postcard indicates -and the missing personal message suggest that K. K. Khouw was not a friend but corresponded professionally with Feller. 29 While the identity of K. K. Khouw stays unknown to us to this day, he or she did leave a few historical traces. K. K. Khouw is mentioned on two passenger lists, arriving in Batavia from Singapore as the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad reports on 18 July 1916 and leaving Batavia by ship as noted in De Indische Courant on 7 May 1924, about six weeks after he or she sent the cards to Feller. 30 We further know that Khouw is the name of an influential and powerful Chinese family from Meester Cornelis. One famous family member was Khouw Kim An, the last Majoor der Chinezen, a high political rank that placed him at the same level as the native regent subordinate to the Resident of Batavia. 31 While a family member with the initials K. K. could not be found in the sources, it is likely that K. K. Khouw came from a branch of this family.     junge Soerabaja. In 1900, the atelier was awarded 'as the royal photographer licensed to bear the royal arms'. 43 It was the only photo studio that was allowed to bear the royal arms. About ten years later, the company was taken over   Since all the cards sent to Feller were inscribed only with the initial 'K.' and a number, they did not function as a vehicle for a personal message but mainly as a commodity to collect and keep. 68 It was not uncommon to send postcards without a personal message, a practice that Eva Tropper has explained with their change of status from text to an image medium around 1900. 69 As photographic images, many of them were kept in albums, often next to personal photographs and prints bought from commercial photo studios. 70

Many
The 'postcard-mania' that exploded around 1900 led to organised collecting activity, the foundation of clubs, magazines, and professional

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