Photographic Prints at the Kern Institute Leiden
An unknown source of Asian art information
Besides books, rare books, manuscripts, and epigraphical rubbings, the Kern Institute possesses an impressive collection of 19th and 20th century photographic prints (70,000). They all deal with the art and archaeology of South and Southeast Asia. In January 1999 the Photographic Project Kern Institute Leiden was launched, with the aim of preserving the prints and of making this enormous potential of visual information accessible to the public. Ten thousand of the oldest prints have been digitalized; relevant information on all prints will be searchable using a database in two and a half years from now.
By Gerda Theuns-de Boer
When the Kern Institute was founded in Leiden in 1925, the board announced with great pride that it could provide the Institute with an interesting scientific collection of photographs. In those days when travel was far more difficult this would enable the students and scholars of Indology to study Asian art and material culture in a much broader sense. Looking at the list of board members it is not surprising they succeeded so well, as it bares the names of some well-known international scholars. Prof. J.Ph. Vogel (1871-1958), chairman, was both a Sanskritist and archaeologist. His links with the Archaeological Survey of India were very strong, as he himself had held various positions within the Survey in the period 1901-1914, ranging from Superintendent of the Northern Circle to Deputy Director General; Prof. N.J. Krom, vice-chairman, the most important scholar and the leading author of that time on Hindu-Javanese art and Borobudur; Lt. Col. Th. Van Erp, member, the surveyor who produced the architectural drawings of Borobudur, and Dr F.D.K. Bosch, appointed commisssioner for the Netherlands Indies. Thanks to their scientific fame and widespread networks, they built up an impressive collection of 40,000 prints. Besides this active contribution, most of the scholars later bequeathed the Institute their private photo collections.At present, we can -roughly speaking- distinguish 4 groups of photographs:
- 19th Century Indonesian photographs: The first group comprises the work of Isidore van Kinsbergen (1821-1905): Series Antiquities of Java I and II ( officially produced between 1863 and 1867) and the Borobudur Series (1873-1874). Looking at the relatively minor deterioration, it is hard to believe that these albumen prints were produced some 125 years ago. The second big name is Kassiann Cephas (1844-1912), court-photographer to the sultan of Yogyakarta, who was responsible for the Prambanam Series in 1889 and the Borobudur plinth Series in 1890. Whereas the work of Isidore van Kinsbergen is almost complete, the Cephas collection is complete.
- 20th Century Indonesian photographs: Mainly consisting of the Prof. Krom collection and the photographic prints of the Archaeological Service of the Netherlands Indies, taken between 1901 and 1941; later continued by the Indonesian Archaeological Service between 1945 and 1955. Although the collection does have gaps, most of the 21,855 Leiden originals are kept in the Kern Institute. In the early nineties they were all safely stored, duplicated, and made accessible within a database by the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania.
- 19th and 20th Century South and Southeast Asian photographs from the Prof. Vogel collection. Although the main focus is pre-partition India, there are also splendid old prints of Burma and Sri Lanka. It is a surprising mixture, ranging from: How on earth did we come by this? to the more systematic excavations of the Archaeological Survey of India in modern North Pakistan in the 1870-s.
- 20th Century photographs of the former Institute of Asian Art and Archaeolgy in Amsterdam. This 'modern collection' (1960-1980) has been built up systematically and with great care. In ca 34,000 prints, South and Southeast Asian art is presented in photographs taken on location and from museum and private art collections.
Preservation
In order to protect but at the same time to be able to study a print to ensure the least amount of damage, each one is stored in a transparent polyester sleeve, prepared by a photographic manufacturer. This container is perfectly safe, but the relative humidity should be watched with great care. If the rate is very high, then the gelatine present in most of the prints made after 1900, could become soft. In order to avoid any possible (small) change of the electrostatic charge of the sleeve, the prints are stored in 6 cm. high boxes, thereby also avoiding the effect of pressure by 'overweight'. The prints are stored horizontally. The boxes are manufactured according to the PAT (Photographic Activity Test) standard. All older prints are stored in an acclimatized room on metal shelves with a baked-enamel finish. The Relative Humidity is kept at 40%, the temperature at 19º C. Although for these prints it is best not to exceed 18º C, it is even more important to keep humidity and temperature constant all the year round. The environmental control also includes air filtration.
The Kern Photographic DatabaseThe information system, called Skopeo, has been developed by the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Services (NIWI). Skopeo consists of a description, a thesaurus, and an access module. The modules work in a Windows-NT client-server environment. The data are stored in an SQL-server database. The 25 description fields are split up into registrational, phototechnical, and subject fields, based on common photo catalogue systems and adjusted to the Kern Institute collection. In order to make the data entry as efficient as possible, incremental field lists are available in the description module. The 10,000 oldest prints are digitalized with a resolution of 300 dpi and stored as a jpeg-compressed image. CD-ROM backups are available. Skopeo contains image manipulation functions, like zooming and contrast enhancement in order to get better access to the details of the digital photo. The system supports the TCP/IP network protocol which makes it possible to create an Internet access to the database and images. The photographic Project is financed by The Mondriaan and the Jan Gonda Foundations.
Drs Gerda Theuns-de Boer, project manager at the Kern Institute, Leiden University E-mail: theuns@let.leidenuniv.nl.