This album is a photo documentation of an early collector, William Louis Abbott (1860-1936) during his travels around Southeast Asia (between 1890-1910). It is one of two albums Abbott donated to the Raffles Museum. The Raffles Museum’s Annual Report (1904) noted this gift was an “exceedingly valuable donation”. Abbott’s method of photographic documentation was influenced by the then-current interest in anthropometry – measurements of the human individual for the purpose of understanding physical variations. The bodies of non-European people became a subject of interest to Western scholars. For some scientists, body measurement even became a means of demonstrating the superiority of the Europeans.Abbott lined his subjects up against a plain backdrop and took front and side view shots. Most of the photographs he took show only the torso and head.
