This photograph shows a nyonya, adorned with bejewelled hairpins, earrings, and kerosang bintang. The photograph is hand-tinted, and stamped with the studio mark ‘Milky Way Studio 8 Hutton Lane Penang.’Studios were already established across the Strait Settlements and the Dutch East Indies by the 1840s and became increasingly prevalent in the 1850s. During the 1920s, Chinese-owned studios dominated the studio photography trade in Southeast Asia. Ranging from formal studio portraits to albums of snapshots of everyday life and stately ancestral portraits, this large group of photographs reveals the many forms of photography available and gives insight into the various aspects of the lives of Peranakans.
