CRA gallery

Vintage travel brochures & photographs

Travel Brochures

Publications by the “Official Tourist Bureau of the Netherlands East Indies” and shipping lines such as Rotterdam Lloyd, Royal Packet Navigation Co. (KPM) and Nederland Royal Mail Line (SMN). Photographs Original photographs of people and scenery in the Dutch East Indies by Woodbury & Page, Kurkdjian, Nieuwenhuis and others.

Miscellaneous

Pre-war travel brochures, picture books from South-East Asian countries and the Netherlands, and other items related to early tourism/travelling.

Welcome CRA gallery is an on-line collection related to tourism in the former Netherlands East Indies. The main categories of the collection are Travel Brochures and Photographs. The “Official Tourist Bureau of the Netherlands East Indies” was founded in 1908 with the aim to promote tourism in the former Dutch colony that is nowadays known as Indonesia. In cooperation with shipping lines, hotels, and other interested parties, the bureau started to publish promotional material such as brochures and travel guides. Some of these were simple, but others were surprisingly sophisticated when the skills of professional photographers, illustrators, and writers were called upon. The brochures, posters and guides published by the bureau (and other organisations involved in the early tourism in the Netherlands East Indies) portrayed a tropical idyll that captured the imagination of many. An important role in this was played by photography in the Dutch East Indies which was pioneered by Woodbury & Page, van Kinsbergen and Cephas among others. The photographic images found their way to Europe and the US, and gradually the beauty of the country and its peoples became known to the larger public. The shortening of the sea route from Europe to the Dutch East Indies through the opening of the Suez canal, and the increased comfort on board of ever faster ships, slowly paved the way for a new type of travellers that can perhaps be described as tourists. It is the link between photography and the early tourism in the Dutch East Indies that is the topic of this on-line collection. The office of the Official Tourist Bureau in Weltevreden (1912).