Exhibition Review: (Re)Presenting the Royal Glass Plate Collection

This article documents a visit to Celebrating the National Glass Plate Negatives Registered as a UNESCO's Memory of the World, held at the National Museum, Bangkok, from late May to 28 July 2018. The UNESCO-registered Royal Collection, comprising nearly 35,427 glass plate negatives and 50,000 prints spanning 1855 to 1935, was originally preserved across three royal libraries belonging to King Chulalongkorn, King Vajiravudh, and Prince Damrongrajanubhab. The exhibition presented approximately 150 archival-quality digital prints across eight gallery rooms arranged in chronological order, tracing Siam's social, cultural, and political transformation during the era of Western colonisation in Asia. Approached from the position of a photo-historical process practitioner, this article reflects on the curatorial decision to exhibit digital reproductions rather than original materials, situating this choice within the competing demands of heritage preservation and public accessibility. It further identifies the absence of photographer credits and technical information in the exhibition labels as a significant gap in the photo-historical reading of the collection. Drawing on Rosalind Morris's account of photographer John Thomson's negotiations at the court of King Rama IV, the article considers the camera as a diplomatic instrument, and examines how the practice of image-making was transmitted across royal generations, accumulating into the collection's present scale. The article closes by locating this encounter within a broader inquiry into Southeast Asian photographic histories, with particular attention to the relative scarcity of comparable pre-1900s collections in Malaya beyond the commercial studios of G.R. Lambert & Co. and Kleingrothe, and calls for greater effort toward gathering and indexing Malayan photographic heritage for future scholarly access.