Biography

Discussion

Adolph Schaefer was an enterprising man. After having exchanged Dresden for The Hague, he apparently conceived a plan to go to the Dutch East Indies as a photographer. With that in mind, Schaefer visited Baron Ph.F.B. Von Siebold, the famous authority on Japan, who had a great deal of influence at the Colonial Ministry, and asked for his recommendation on a request that the Ministry cover the costs of his passage to the Dutch Indies. He would later repay the costs by carrying out photographic contracts for the Gouvernement of the Indies. For the Colonial Ministry this offer came at a convenient time. In November, 1840, the Medical Officer 3rd Class, I. Munnick, had been sent to the Indies with a ‘heliographic apparatus of Daguerre’, but his assignment to photograph buildings, landscapes and antiquities had produced only disappointments. Now that a professional photographer presented himself, they were delighted with his his proposal. In this way Schaefer became the first professional photographer in The Netherlands to obtain a government commission.

Schaefer’s origins and education are unknown; when he settled in The Hague he was already a daguerreotypist. In The Hague he advertised that he was prepared to teach others the skills of making daguerreotypes. Von Siebold was full of praise for the quality of Schaefer’s daguerreotypes. He had had the opportunity to compare these with what was being done in Paris in this field, and came to the conclusion that ‘Schaefer’s daguerreotypes compare with the best that are being produced there today.’

How greatly Adolph Schaefer’s expedition appealed to the people of his time is shown by the discount that the shipping line gave on his passage to Batavia out of their enthusiasm. On his arrival there the Gouvernement presented him with a contract running to January, 1845. He would receive a monthly advance of 325,- guilders; the contract required that he must repay this advance with his photographic work, but this work had yet to be arranged. The Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences was asked to propose art objects to be photographed by Schaefer. They suggested the Borobudur, in the Residence of Kedu, and also their own collection of Hindu sculptures. The Society also let the Governor General know that the prices asked by Schaefer were much higher than those current in Europe, and that an enormous amount of money would be needed to acquire a number of the photographs large enough to be of use in the archaeological research.

The prices that Schaefer was asking were indeed high: a large daguerreotype was to cost 150 guilders, a medium-sized one 120, and a small one 50 gulden, while in The Netherlands at the time the price, certainly for small daguerreotypes, was under ten guilders. On the other hand, one must keep in mind that Schaefer had to repay his debt to the Gouvernement. The Batavian Society arrived at an agreement with Schaefer for photographing their collection of sculptures against a payment of 800 guilders. Schaefer apparently had a weak bargaining position, because he consented to make a total of 66 daguerreotypes of Hindu sculptures and some other antiquities, a number that certainly was entirely out of proportion with the price agreed upon.

After completing this task, Schaefer went to the Surakarta Residentie, where he met with the archaeologist W.A. van den Ham to discuss his assignment at the Borobudur, before travelling to the Residence of Kedu with his luggage to begin his great work there.

Considered in retrospect, the results of his first work at Borobudur can certainly not be called bad. Schaefer succeeded in giving the sculptures and reliefs that he photographed there the right lighting, to give them some three-dimensionality. The daguerreotypes reveal evidence of his technical skill, but do show traces of the primitive circumstances under which he had to work. He had no adequate darkroom in which to make his plates and finish the photographs; wind and dust entered the room made available to him in the government buildings near the Borobudur. There was an additional problem: the galleries in the Borobudur were too narrow to permit sufficient distance from the reliefs. Schaefer had to photograph the reliefs in sections and subsequently make the order of the plates clear by making mosaics of them. Van den Ham was of the opinion that the bas-reliefs should be on one plate in their entirety. It was technically impossible for Schaefer to do this. Van den Ham believed that the succession of the reliefs could not be seen with certainty from the plates, which reduced the scientific value of the project. He noted this as an important criticism in his raport. Schaefer had however taken this into account: he had had some successive shots overlap somewhat. No less problematic in the eyes of the archaeologist Van den Ham was apparently the way in which a camera records things. Where a draughtsman is able to eliminate undesirable irregularities, the camera records the existing situation: the caved in sections, collapsed sections and cracks in the reliefs were as clearly visible as the sculptures themselves, and obscured the idea of the original conception. Van den Ham was presumably more interested in the composition and narrative of the reliefs than in their present condition. He also had his doubts about the possibility of being able to make proper engravings from these daguerreotypes, something which was necessary for any future publication on the Borobudur.

In the meantime calculations and plans were being made for the continuation of Schaefer’s work. He would need five years to record the Borobudur in its entirety, and between four and five thousand plates. He declared that he was prepared to take on this massive task, but coupled this with the request that he be appointed a civil servant in special service, with a regular income and a pension for himself, his wife and children back in Germany. If necessary, he would accept a sum of 150,000,- guilders, divided over the years it would take him to complete the project. The Gouvernement did not appreciate this proposal; it found these demands too high. As fate would have it, Van den Ham died at precisely this point, so that the scientific guidance that was thought indispensable could no longer be provided. The Gouvernement then decided to call a halt to the project.

Schaefer received permission to go to Semarang and set up as a photographer there. It was hoped that through his work he could repay his debts – which, including all the advances on his travel, his equipment and his continuing living costs had now risen to 24,240.90 guilders. As might have been foreseen, Schaefer failed in this. After several months reports reached the Governor General from Semarang that Schaefer had almost no clients. He was then given permission to move to Surabaya, Madura and Sumanep, but in August, 1849, he was summoned to Batavia for a definitive settlement of his debts. He was unable to pay them, so his photographic equipment was sold at public auction, raising only 227.14 guilders, so that the Gouvernement was forced to pay the other debts from its own pocket. It is not known what happened to the unfortunate Schaefer after that. He was left to his fate in the Dutch Indies without any means of making a living.

The failure of this first Dutch governmental commission was a sad affair, without doubt to be attributed to an overly naive attitude on the part of the Dutch government and the authorities in the Dutch Indies with regard to its financial aspects. Nevertheless, it is significant that so soon after the discovery of photography they were willing to provide funds to apply the medium to scientific research. The motivation for this undertaking was presumably the idea that there would be international interest in a publication about Indonesian antiquities, a plausible idea, given the great interest in all things Oriental in those years. The successful book Excursions Daguerriennes, published in 1842 by N.P. Lerebours, might have given rise to this idea. The engravings in this book, made from daguerreotypes by the French painter Horace Vernet and his nephew, the painter/publisher Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, depict monuments from the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, the Near East, Russia and the United States. Additional similar publications appeared in the second half of the 1840s in France and England. A book prepared from Schaefer’s daguerreotypes would however differed from these publications because the emphasis would have been on the detailed studies needed for scientific research; it would probably have contained no survey photographs of the monuments in the landscapes surrounding them.

Although Schaefer’s daguerreotypes never fulfilled their intended function, they remain unique documents as the oldest photographic depictions of the antiquities on Java.

Documentation