The riches of photography for Indonesia's social history have been well explored for the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s. Other studies have examined commemorative albums, picture postcards, and the documentation of individuals, ethnic groups, antiquities, cities, railways, factories, plantations and mines. In Refracted visions, Karen Strassler takes the study of society and its peoples via the camera into the era of independent Indonesia. The focus of interest is new, and so is the author's approach.
Strassler is, herself, a photographer. During two years of fieldwork in Yogyakarta (1998–2000), she joins a photography club, going on day trips with members ‘hunting’ for the picturesque; she reads photography magazines; visits photographic studios and print and photocopying shops; she talks to Indonesian photographers; and looks at friends’ albums. In every home she records what Indonesians have pinned to their walls or framed. She is in the text, recording snatches of conversations, often giving an informant's particular choice of words in Indonesian to convey the nuance and the moment. Woven around all this are reflections on the modern Indonesian nation, the relationship of individual to the state, and how visual records reflect, perpetuate or subvert official discourse. Thanks to a subvention from the Getty Foundation, the book is lavishly illustrated, so readers can see for themselves the photographs so thoughtfully analysed.
Camera technology has made dramatic advances since Woodbury and Page set up the first photography studio in Batavia in 1857. Strassler argues that Suharto's authoritarian state generated a culture of documentation. She studies several genres of photographs: studio portraits; amateur snaps; identity photographs; rituals of family life; and student photographs of political demonstrations. The final chapter presents a detailed study of an army veteran who uses photographs to prove that a divine light had entered him to verify his special status as agent for the late President Sukarno, and to fulfil his mission of moving history towards the time when Sukarno would re-emerge as leader of Indonesia and, indeed, of the world.
The early part of the book looks at the late colonial era amateur photographers and the subjects they chose. Strassler notes that, since Dutch times, Indonesians of Chinese descent have dominated photography. She reproduces photographs from their albums, suggesting the rich vein for study in Indonesian albums from this period. She notes an early taste for transforming photographs of places into pictorial art, mirroring the mooie Indië (beautiful Indies) style of contemporary painters.
Painted backdrops in the professional studios show changing tastes and aspirations. Strassler discovered a progression, among old backdrops in studios she visited, from a timeless landscape of rice fields, palm trees and mountains, to scenes of city life. Photographers posed their customers beside radios, fake television sets, and bicycles or motorcycles. Strassler brings out the poignancy that Chinese Indonesians created images of ‘real’ Indonesia and Indonesians, a documented authenticity from which they themselves were excluded.
Strassler argues that viewers bring their own meanings to photographs. Photographs are ‘world creating’, rather than ‘world duplicating’; people present themselves to themselves and to others ‘as if’ (p. 79). Through the professional photographer, they draw on global media images. Photographers offer their patrons a repertoire of images from which to choose and stake claim to a particular social position or fantasy. Strassler illustrates this point with photographs of Javanese Muslim girls dressing up in studio costumes as Chinese princesses.
The chapter on the identity card photograph explores the state's control of its people. The photograph is proof of belonging within the national community on the state's terms. Text accompanying the identity photograph reduces the individual to a list of visual specificities and a religious label. For many Javanese in the 1960s and 1970s, the identity card was the only photograph they possessed of themselves and their loved ones. Strassler found these cards in albums, on walls, arranged as if in a group shot. Here, she says, is the acceptance of the modern notion that one's identity can be established through photographic signs. She finds a translation of the identity card's expressionless face into wedding photographs. In Strassler's analysis, the point of photographing the wedding ritual is to prove it was correctly performed. Spontaneity, she says, is ‘edited out’. This is ‘auto-ethnography’ (p. 176).
In an epilogue, Strassler states that paper photographs serve memories we choose to retain and recall. But digital photographs now take Indonesians into a new era where images are accessible, unregulated and always ‘out there’ in cyberspace. Photographs from the digital era pose new ways of examining what it means to be Indonesian. It is to be hoped the author will bring her knowledge and insights to this new stage in Indonesians’ engagement with images.
