This album belongs to a set of four ethnographic photo albums donated to the Raffles Library and Museum by collectors who travelled around the Southeast Asian region. Some of these photographs were documentation of early indigenous communities portraying their lifestyles. This album is the only known donation given by Captain Giovanni Battista Cerruti (1850–1914), an early collector to the Raffles Museum. It contains a large number of photographs illustrating the life of the Mai Darat tribe. Some of these images were published in his book, My Friends the Savages (1908).
