This is a heavy book to hold in one's hands, printed on glossy paper, with hundreds of photographs, for a really good price, an album of modern Indonesian history, from the 1900s to 2000s; and, as one turns the pages, first quickly and then increasingly slowly, the book is full of wonderful writing. There are not many books on Indonesian photography like that (and, as I think of it now, none, in fact, besides the essays in Rosalind Morris's volume).Footnote ¹ During the past decade or so, a substantial number of studies on colonial and postcolonial photography appeared, either general or area focused, but even among this multitude, Strassler's book is extraordinary. One reason might be Strassler's particular method: her touch-and-go approach, great care in setting up an analytical framework, and, as her research and writing progress, equally great courage to let herself be led and inspired by each new photograph, interview, or other event. There is wondering, excitement, and discovery throughout; it is what carries the book to its conclusions. In this way, Strassler is able to present a convincing history of present. Her history first seems collapsed into images—the sepia photographs of the 1900s, the studio portraits of the 1930s, the amateur creations of the 1950s, the Technicolor-bright and unbearably loud renderings of family rituals, and, close to the end of the book, the (equally bright) snapshots of the student demonstrations of the 1990s. It was between 1998 and 2002 that Strassler was there, in the middle of it, in the central Javanese university city of Yogyakarta. Then and there, very clearly, she was inspired to write the book. From that moment, and discovery, against the time, modern Indonesian photography—and modern Indonesian history to a very large extent—is explained.

“The error would be,” wrote Francis Picabia, “in seeking a rebus where there is only vision.”Footnote ² Karen Strassler did not make this error. She hardly could, because she wrote the book as a scholar and photographer in one. Strassler heeds Pramoedya Ananta Toer's words that “demonstration is part of inhabiting” (p. xiv). She, indeed, gets herself “enlisted”—like being a “designated photographer” at her Javanese friends' family “pregnancy ritual” (p. 181). Through participation (touching carefully and lightly), through taking pictures herself and publishing them in the book side-by-side with the works of the others, she demonstrates, inhabits, and answers newly many crucial questions of colonial and postcolonial scholarship. A profound commentary is provided on the Dutch colonists (and late colonial cultures) “picturing themselves,” as well as on the Indonesian amateurs (and postcolonial Indonesia), taking pictures, more recently equipped with their own respective machineries of imagining, “never asking permission to photograph,” “choreographing” their subjects—“Move forward, look at me … now throw, smile” (p. 33).

Refracted Visions, naturally, contains a number of statements and theories about colonial and postcolonial photography that are not really new—about camera as fetish, photographer in the center, photographed face as a mask, worn or built in. But, in virtually each of these and other cases like that, Strassler gives life to the statements and theories; the momentum of her encountering Indonesia always goes first. Strassler happily touches on the authorities like Sontag, Berger, Pinney, Buckley, Geertz, Siegel, or Anderson; she gets valuable and often surprising wisdom from them but then happily, lightly disengages herself, back to her archive, her camera, her interviews, and her search for the sense of it all. In this particular connection, I think, the Bakhtian term she has chosen for the title of her book sounds most true: her ways of looking—and this is to be most admired—are “refracted visions.”

Strassler's respect for a photograph, for each photograph as a tangible and perishable thing, is unusual and very effective. When, for instance, she writes about her discovery of a trace of a fingerprint in “the upper right hand corner” of a negative from several decades ago, she proves as effectively as I remember anybody proving that a historical document speaks by being temporary and that history moves by events. There are many instances of this in the book—photograph eaten by worms, woman shrugging her shoulders when asked why all her family photographs are gone, another woman burning Internet printouts (!) that she believes might compromise her husband (pp. 296–7). Strassler's Refracted Visions are built on these moments.

The punctum of the book, wherefrom Strassler's history evolves, is the chapter on students' photographs of their demonstrations in the late 1990s. She was so completely there; the book is dedicated to her friend, a student and a photographer, killed during the upheavals. It is also here, and it is most impressive of all, that Strassler's visions remain “refracted.” This, if nothing else, would make the book so very good. The students with cameras, many of them beaten, some of them killed, the young people around the author, her friends, became figures in whom the Indonesian modern, colonial, and postcolonial history is expressed—heroic figures of a depressing (to me at least) history—a history of “as if,” of a misguided and always born-again conviction that “to witness is to act.” The students appear in the photographs and in the text—tragic runners on the “circuits of witnessing,” citizens of backdrops as history, of images as the material foundations for the future. Once more and again: “Move forward, look at me … now throw, smile” (p. 33).

Still, perhaps, the punctum of history and image, and this is also suggested by this moving book, is yet elsewhere—in the huge and omnipresent invisible: the nonexistent, forgotten, destroyed, or hidden photographs of the bloody events of the fall 1945, and of the fall of 1965, of the murdered and murdering people, of the moments when Indonesian history, who knows, halted and for a very short while catastrophically ceased to be “as if.”