Burdens of Proof

What is it about?

There is but a limited scholarship on photographic sources from the Dutch military actions during Indonesian’s National Revolution (1945–9), and what exists almost entirely neglects perhaps the largest component of the archives: Dutch soldiers’ amateur photographs. Yet this category of photographs has simultaneously attracted much public and media controversy. This article contends that a narrow range of soldiers’ amateur photographs have thus far borne an anomalously weighty burden of proof to substantiate the nature and limits of extreme violence during the Indonesian National Revolution, one that is brittle and difficult to sustain unless historians begin to broaden the focus of investigations into photographic archives. This article also inquires what it may mean for present-day Indonesians to see their ancestors as perpetrators as well as victims of violence, and importantly, as occupants of the ambiguous categories between both ends of this spectrum. What will be the ethics of looking at and reproducing these photographs, and who will they belong to?

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