Figure 1
Two young Republican volunteers from Celebes (Sulawesi), members of the armed youth organisation KRIS (Kebaktian Rakyat Indonesia Sulawesi) on leave in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, December 1947; silver gelatin print used for publication in Panorama, January 30, 1948; credit: Nationaal Archief/Collectie Spaarnestad/Hugo Wilmar.
Spaarnestad photographer Hugo Wilmar (1923-1957) made this photo during an undercover reportage in Yogyakarta, the then capital of the Indonesian Republic. Wilmar posed as an American photojournalist, because Dutch journalists were forbidden to enter the Republican territories at that time. Between 1945 and 1949, Indonesia fought a bloody war of independence, also known as the Indonesian National Revolution, against its former coloniser the Netherlands. The photo reportage, including this picture, was published in both Panorama and Katholieke Illustratie within an anti-Republican context, as De Spaarnestad fully supported the Dutch government’s policy on Indonesia. In 2022, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam chose this image as the key visual for its major exhibition Revolusi! Indonesia Independent (February 11 - June 5, 2022). The exhibition favoured a very nuanced view of the conflict, featuring personal stories that ‘tell of the impassioned pursuit of a free Indonesia’ (museum website, 2022).
Figure 2
Verso of figure 1, explanation of the annotations: top centre, contemporary caption in pen: ‘Yogya, Two volunteers from Celebes belonging to the Kris armed youth organisation in the republ. capital, accompanied by a girl’; below: label and stamp referring to the publication date in Panorama; left and right in pencil: cropping instructions; centre, red stamp referring to the Spaarnestad photo library and the CODEC-code 5241-173, a further subdivision of the CODEC main heading 5 (statesmanship): ‘Staatsvorming Indonesië, vrouw en kind als militair’ (State-building Indonesia, women and children as soldiers).
Figure 3
Panorama, January 30, 1948, 8-9, featuring figure 1 on page 9, credit: Nationaal Archief/Collectie Spaarnestad.
Figure 4
Two young Republican volunteers from Celebes (Sulawesi), members of the armed youth organisation KRIS (Kebaktian Rakyat Indonesia Sulawesi) on leave in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, December 1947; silver gelatin print used for publication in Katholieke Illustratie, January 29, 1948; credit: Nationaal Archief/Collectie Spaarnestad/Hugo Wilmar.
Figure 5
Verso of figure 4, explanation of the annotations: top right, contemporary caption in pen: ‘Yogya, Two republ. volunteers from Celebes, members of the armed youth organisation “Kris”, still very young, but already at the front in East Java, on leave in Y.’; top left: label and stamp referring to the publication date in Katholieke Illustratie; centre, in pencil: cropping instructions; left, in green pen: reference to CODEC-code 1055-1, a further subdivision of the CODEC main heading 1 (war): ‘Vrouwenkorpsen Indonesië’ (Women’s Army Corps Indonesia), the person who filed the image assumed incorrectly that all persons depicted were women.
Figure 6
Katholieke Illustratie, January 29, 1948, 40-41, featuring figure 4 on page 41; credit: Nationaal Archief/Collectie Spaarnestad.
Figure 7
Billboard campaign for the exhibition Revolusi! Indonesia Independent (11 February – 5 June 2022) Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, featuring Hugo Wilmar’s photograph (figure 4) from the Spaarnestad Collection in the National Archives; photo by the author, Museumplein, Amsterdam, January 2022.