But the latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia casts the history of photography in a new light. And the timing, in the second decade of the "Asian century", could not be more apt.

Garden of the East is taken from the gallery's collection of photography from Indonesia, from the earliest days of the art in the 1850s, to just before the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia in 1945.

Thanks to two acquisitions of collections, the gallery now holds the largest grouping of such work outside The Netherlands.

Despite director Ron Radford's policy of prioritising south-east Asia for acquisitions, this was not always the case.

Curator Gael Newton recalls being asked by an intern from Malaysia sometime in the 1990s how many photographs by Asian photographers the gallery owned.

"Nobody had ever even asked the question," Ms Newton said. "I said, 'I don't know - a few'. His project was to tell us how many. I think we scraped in with something under 200 photographs that were even of Asia, and we had two or three people who were Asian."

It was a situation that seems scandalous today, but Ms Newton says it was indicative of the time.

"We weren't alert to seeing we were having Asian-born artists as well as images of Asia," she said.

When Dr Radford arrived as director in 2004, he formed a policy of collecting art from South-East Asia, and the gallery is now known for the breadth of its collections in the area.

Garden of the East is the first major record of this period of Indonesian photography, and contains more than 250 photographs by more than 100 professional and amateur photographers, as well as albums and illustrated books that all shine a light on the life and culture of the region.

The works were created by photographers of many nationalities, as well as Javanese artist Kassian Cephas, a major photographer of the period.

"He was a Christian rather than a Muslim, and he was an official attendant in the court of the Sultan of Jogjakarta," Ms Newton says.

"The sultan's court had been after a photographer since the 1850s, one of their own, and through that support he was trained as a photographer. Until the early 1900s, he was quite prolific and hugely successful - he was celebrated by Dutch officials as well, and received various gold medals.

''Most of his work was on the antiquities and the dance culture, and he's a bit of a hero of our show. He has been recognised in the past, but we feel he hasn't been recognised enough."

Many of the other works are by Chinese or Chinese-Indonesians, as is the case in many photographic studios in Indonesia today.

Frank Hurley is the only Australian photographer, as well as the only well-known artist, to feature in the show. He was the only Australian known to have worked in Indonesia before World War II, and was commissioned to promote tourist cruises from Australia to the Indies by the Royal Packet Naval Company.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop will officially open the show next week.

Garden of the East: Photography in Indonesia 1850s-1940s is showing at the National Gallery of Australia until June 22.