Just Published (March 2025)
Scott Merrillees (1962) is an independent photo historian focusing on the history of photography in Indonesia, particularly from the 1840s through to the 1970s. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, and graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Melbourne in 1984, with majors in accounting and Indonesian studies. He learned the Indonesian language at high school and university in Australia (1975–1983) and at Satya Wacana Christian University in Salatiga, Central Java, Indonesia (1981–1982). He worked in Jakarta for more than twenty-five years in equity research, capital markets, banking, mining and healthcare.
Scott has collected and researched early photographs and picture postcards of Indonesia for over thirty years and he is best known for his three books on the history and development of Jakarta from the middle of the nineteenth century: BATAVIA in Nineteenth Century Photographs (published in 2000 and reprinted in 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2010), Greetings from JAKARTA: Postcards of a Capital 1900–1950 (published in 2012 and reprinted in 2013 and 2019, plus a Dutch language edition in 2012) and JAKARTA: Portraits of a Capital 1950–1980 (published in 2015). More recently there is also FACES OF INDONESIA: 500 Postcards 1900–1945 (published in 2021) which examines the extraordinary diversity of the people of Indonesia and how they were represented photographically during the last half century before Indonesian independence was achieved in 1945.
His most recent book BALI: Photography 1865-1939 (published in March 2025) is the first comprehensive survey of the history of photography on Bali in pre-independence Indonesia. It examines who was photographing Bali from the mid-1860s to the late 1930s, what influences shaped how Bali was photographed and how it was presented to the world.
- Scott can be contacted at:
- scott.merrillees@gmail.com