Karen Strassler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.

Refracted Visions

POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY AND NATIONAL MODERNITY IN JAVABy KAREN STRASSLER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4593-0

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS………………………………………………………………..ixPREFACE……………………………………………………………………..xiiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………xviiNOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND PSEUDONYMS……………………………………………..xxiINTRODUCTION Popular Photography and Indonesian National Modernity…………………1ONE Amateur Visions…………………………………………………………..29TWO Landscapes of the Imagination………………………………………………73THREE Identifying Citizens…………………………………………………….123FOUR Family Documentation……………………………………………………..165FIVE Witnessing History……………………………………………………….207SIX Revelatory Signs………………………………………………………….251EPILOGUE Beyond the Paper Trace………………………………………………..295NOTES……………………………………………………………………….301BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………345INDEX……………………………………………………………………….363

Chapter One

Amateur Visions

A SMALL SEPIA PHOTOGRAPH taken around 1910 shows Tan Gwat Bing, a Chinese-Indonesian amateur photographer, with two companions on an excursion to Parangtritis, a dramatic stretch of beach to the south of Yogyakarta. They ride bicycles and wear white suits and jaunty caps. Their cameras are strapped over their shoulders. They are at the end of a railway track, as if they have reached the outer limit of civilization. An angular wooden structure, perhaps part of a bridge, encloses two of the riders like a viewfinder. A second photograph from the same excursion shows the photographers relaxing in the shade of a ramshackle hut as local inhabitants look on; their immaculate white clothing brings them into sharp relief against the muted tones of their surround. One stands with a foot resting on a bench in a conventionally colonialist pose of mastery; his hand rests casually on the thermos slung across his chest. Another lounges, one leg stretched in front of him, his back leaning against a bamboo pole of the hut. A third, Tan Gwat Bing himself, rests his “box” camera on his knee. Villagers, children, and adults stand watching; one, a barefoot man in rags with a farming tool resting on his shoulder, appears also to be posing for the unseen photographer.

Nearly a century later, I accompanied amateur photographers on another “hunting” expedition to a village not far from where Tan Gwat Bing and his friends had cycled. At daybreak, Jack, his teenage son Budi, and Edy picked me up in Jack’s old van. We drove through the awakening streets of Yogyakarta, heading south out of the city, soon entering the flat river plain of Bantul with its lush rice fields and forests of sugar cane. After a long stretch on the main road, which we shared with buses and trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and becak (pedicabs), we turned off onto a road that led east toward the river. On either side were brilliantly green rice fields in which farmers bent over their seedlings. Yogyakarta had disappeared from view, and one could easily forget that it sat-with its urban bustle and suffocating pollution-between these peacefully tended fields and the ancient volcano looming over the scene, a gentle wisp of smoke rising from its perfect cone. Mist caught in the trees along the edges of the paddy. As we traveled down the rough and narrowing road, women heading in the opposite direction for the local market, carrying their produce on their backs or precariously balanced on their bicycles, slowed our progress.

Along the way I chatted in the back with Edy. He explained that today we would be “hunting” with a purpose: to take pictures for entry into a photo contest with the theme of “Happiness in Old Age,” sponsored by the Asia/Pacific Cultural Center for UNESCO (ACCU). Jack and Edy were both members of Yogyakarta’s amateur photography club, HISFA (Himpunan Seni Foto Amatir, Association for Amateur Art Photography, founded 1954), and both often submitted photographs to local, national, and international photography competitions. Though they often went hunting together, they seemed an unlikely pair-Jack was a Chinese Indonesian in his early fifties who wore thick glasses, belted out rock songs at gatherings, played poker, and never tired of joking, while Edy was a soft-spoken Christian Javanese, perhaps in his early forties, who maintained a low profile at HISFA events. Jack joined HISFA in 1975; Edy had been a member since 1991. Both had gradually made photography their profession, Jack by opening a studio in his home and photographing weddings and funerals, and Edy by photographing graduations and other events.

The little road ended abruptly at the foot of a bamboo bridge that spanned the wide, slow-moving river. The bridge, and the heavily burdened people walking across it, glowed golden in the morning light. Jack told me that the bridge frequently washes away during the rainy season as heavy downpours turn the green shallow waters into a torrent of mud. While the sand from the riverbed is used for construction projects in the city, there is no infusion of money here to build a sturdier bridge. So the picturesque but fragile bamboo bridge is rebuilt each time. This spot had been a favorite HISFA hunting destination for years. All of Bantul, Edy told me, with its quiet villages, open vistas, volcano views, and stretches of beach had long been the favored “terrain” of Yogyakarta’s amateurs.

At first, Jack and Edy set up their tripods on an embankment to take photographs of the market women as they made their way across the bridge. Soon, though, we decided to cross it ourselves-a tricky enterprise as we were going against traffic. On the other side, instead of walking into the village, we followed a narrow path along the riverbank and down to the exposed gravel of the riverbed. There, a small group of people was at work shoveling and two large yellow dump trucks sat waiting for their daily fill of sand.

Jack and Edy moved comfortably through the scene, politely greeting people as we passed and offering brief, socially lubricating explanations like, “We’re going for a walk” (Javanese: mlampah-mlampah) or “We’re exercising” (Indonesian: olah-raga). They knew what they were looking for; they spoke to each other of “good camera face,” “good color,” and “good light.” As we moved from spot to spot, Jack’s son was enlisted to help carry the various lenses and equipment, and occasionally he received his father’s instruction on how to photograph. But mostly he stood to the side, conspicuously holding his cell phone and looking bored.

Jack and Edy soon found their “objects” (obyek)-an old man waist deep in water shoveling sand out of the river and an old woman in a faded pink kebaya (blouse) gathering small rocks into a basket. When it was filled, she would carry it on her head up the bank of the river into the village where someone would crush the rocks with a hammer to form dark piles of volcanic sand. Jack and Edy worked in tandem, one training his camera while the other engaged the “object” in light banter, asking friendly questions, hoping to elicit a laugh or an animated expression. They never asked permission to photograph, but their style of interaction was ingratiating-lighthearted and informal, but respectful. The old woman seemed highly amused by the whole scene and provided satisfyingly exuberant laughs in response to their joking questions. The old man willingly obliged as they choreographed his movements: “Move forward, look at me, now take the sand up slowly, now throw, smile.” Neither seemed particularly surprised by the encounter. Other people, who paused occasionally from their work to watch the scene, seemed to find it comical. When I asked Edy later how people typically respond to being photographed, he said simply (echoing the consensus of most amateurs), “Usually, they like it.” Neither Edy nor Jack seemed perturbed by the idea that what they were depicting as “happiness in old age” were two elderly people engaged in heavy physical labor.

In the late colonial period and early years of independence the word amatir (an Indonesianization of the Dutch and English “amateur”) had a particular meaning, one laced with the feel of modern technology and the privilege of leisure. Amatir were members of an elite group of photographers who defined their practice against, on the one hand, the humble tukang potret (studio photographer) who worked for pay and to satisfy his customers, and on the other hand, the family “snap-shooter,” whose goal was mere documentation and who knew nothing of how to craft an aesthetically pleasing image. The prosaic demands of neither work nor family life constrained the amateur photographer, who left such cares behind when he came to the club. He was motivated by the distinctly personal pleasures of discovery, dedicated self-improvement, and sociality. The universally legible “language of photography” provided a medium, a lingua franca, for a new community of likeminded people. This “brotherhood” comprised not only the face-to-face gathering of (mostly) men who together mined the landscape of Indonesia for its beauty and transformed its peoples into objects of aesthetic appreciation. Being an amateur also meant becoming joined as if by an invisible technological tether to a global community of photographers throughout the modern world.

Today, Indonesian amateurs more often use the English word “hobby” to describe what they do, but they still go hunting, have meetings, and participate in contests-the main activities of amateur photography clubs since the late colonial period. Also enduring is the vision generated by amateur photographers of an authentic (asli) Indonesia preserved in “traditional” villages and court enclaves, located temporally and spatially at a remove from the urban elites who would portray it. It is perhaps no surprise that it would be self-consciously cosmopolitan and modern urban elites who would envision a romanticized, authentic Indonesia. Yet the ambiguous position of Chinese Indonesians within the nation lends a particular poignancy to this otherwise familiar story of elite nostalgia and modernist constructions of the traditional.

Throughout the postcolonial period, the majority of amateur practitioners have been upper-middle-class, urban Chinese Indonesians. When I began my inquiries into the history of photography I often met with startled reactions when I would observe that many photographers seemed to be ethnic Chinese and many photographic practices seemed to have roots in the Chinese community. Chinese Indonesian amateurs would often hastily protest that they felt themselves to be thoroughly Indonesian; they spoke no Chinese and felt no connection to China. Presenting the club as an ideal microcosm of the national community, they would emphasize the harmony and lack of concern for ethnic labels among its diverse members. Only when I made clear that my aim was not to identify photography as “Chinese” in opposition to “Indonesian” but rather to trace the contribution that people of Chinese descent had made to the envisioning of the nation did this initial defensiveness ease.

These discomforted reactions signaled the charged ambiguity of Chinese Indonesians’ participation in the fraternal bonds of the nation, a sense of ambivalent belonging that refracts through Chinese Indonesian amateurs’ light-hearted photographic interactions with the rural poor in peaceful village settings. That people were willing to talk about these matters as openly as they were was probably due to the more open climate of reformasi in which my research took place. Yet as I got to know them better, many spoke of painful experiences of being marked as different and of feeling that they could never prove that they were “really” Indonesian. The devastating anti-Chinese riots that had accompanied reformasi in Jakarta and Solo in 1998 were just the most recent, potent reminder of the prevalent anti-Chinese sentiment they experienced daily as a submerged form of threat. Despite inclusive gestures toward the Chinese community following Suharto’s resignation, the rise of radical Islam and religiously inflected violence-many ethnic Chinese are Christians-and the ongoing political and economic crisis that also marked this period meant continued vigilance and fear among Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority. Although informed by global pictorialist aesthetics and shared by other colonial and postcolonial elites, Chinese Indonesians’ investment in a romanticized and depoliticized encounter with racial and class others can also be understood as a response to tensions they faced in their everyday lives in urban Java.

Participation in a self-consciously global practice allowed postcolonial Chinese Indonesian photographers to transcend their fraught location within the nation by sustaining transnational affiliations. Yet their cosmopolitan orientations were not necessarily opposed to their aspirations toward national belonging; rather, Chinese Indonesian amateurs sought to define themselves as exemplary modern national citizens through their technological mastery and their promotion of Indonesia to the global community. They sought to produce a distinctively Indonesian photographic repertoire-a kind of national currency marketable in an international exchange of photographic images produced by their “salonist” peers in Europe, the United States, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

During the New Order, the state began enlisting amateurs to document the cultural riches of an Indonesia increasingly devoted economically to cultural tourism and culturally to a discourse of tradition and authenticity (keaslian). Forced by New Order prohibitions on the public display of Chinese cultural affiliation to abandon overt signs of their own Chineseness, Chinese Indonesian photographers devoted themselves to documenting the cultural displays of others, thereby helping to produce a visual iconography of the asli nation. As amateur practice was increasingly channeled toward state-sponsored goals, amateur images began to travel beyond the narrow circuit of clubs. Images drawn from the amateur archive-of young children taking shelter from the rain under massive banana leaves and farmers guiding their water buffalo on a dusty path, of women drawing intricate designs in wax on batik cloth and bustling “traditional” markets, of dancers in elaborate costumes and volcanoes towering over vivid green rice fields-appeared in tourist brochures, postcards, and glossy picture books.

While promoting Indonesia to an international tourism market, these images also began to appear domestically in state-sponsored books and billboards, in advertisements for a wide range of consumer products, and in political campaign imagery. This secondary life of amateur images, moving out of the more narrow and elite circuits of club members and into the realm of a public, national visual culture, helped produce an ideally imagined authentic Indonesia: an idyll of peaceful villagers, pristine nature, and colorfully vibrant “tradition.” Ironically, the images Chinese Indonesian amateurs produced have ultimately reinforced indigenist ideologies of national belonging that exclude them from full belonging in the nation.

The Double Gaze of Colonial Amateur Photography

The practice of amateur photography helped forge a late colonial society made up of Dutch, Chinese Indonesian, and Javanese elites brought together by bonds of sociality, a common technological expertise, and a shared aestheticizing gaze toward lower-class “natives.” Amateurs used cameras to transform the people and topography of the Indies into objects of aesthetic contemplation and value. Even before 1870 some commercial photographers were selling equipment and offering lessons to amateurs. By the close of the nineteenth century, the new availability of portable cameras, film negatives, and easier developing techniques helped spur widespread enthusiasm for photography as a hobby. Amateur photography gained popularity in tandem with the popularization of anthropological discourses and the development of tourism in the Indies. By the first decades of the twentieth century cameras were frequent companions on picnics, hunts, and other excursions.

“Salon photography,” a movement that aimed to elevate photography to the status of an art, provided a global context for Indies amateur practice. In London, in 1893, a group known as the Linked Ring broke with the more science-oriented Royal Photographic Society and held the first “salon” exhibition. The “salon” movement they founded would expand, in subsequent decades, into an international network of amateur photography clubs. Salonists sought to develop photography as an “independent art” wrested “from the bondage of that which was purely scientific or technical.” Club-sponsored competitive salon exhibitions, as well as popular magazines for amateurs, became the principal vehicles for the dissemination of the pictorialist aesthetics they embraced. Pictorialism “stressed the depiction of subjective states of being over objective facts” and celebrated the pre-industrial value of craft and the elevating function of art. Belief in the edifying effects of the contemplation of natural beauty led to a preference for landscape photographs. Eschewing positivist uses of photography, pictorial photography was to represent “the ideal”: “This could not be done when imagery was too specific, too clearly documenting an identifiable person, time or place.” As one critic wrote in 1898, “The aim of pictorial art is not to copy nature, but to appeal to the imagination.”

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Excerpted from Refracted Visionsby KAREN STRASSLER Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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