Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java

Objects/Histories

by Karen Strassler

A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions , Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals.
Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national nostalgia for rural idylls and “tradition,” desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography’s primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.

Genres: Anthropology

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Zhoel13 · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, I really like this book. So, if I point out some criticisms about it below, it is more like what I wish the book could have done than a complete take-down of the author's arguments.

Strassler offers a fresh perspective on studying popular photography in "Java" (I will explain why I put the quotation marks later) and its relationship to Indonesian nationalism--a subject that has rarely been discussed both in the domestic and international academia. I find her concept of "refracted visions" as challenges to holistic and homogeneous visions of nationalism, citizenship, and photography-as-technology, useful for my own research. Well-grounded in various visual and cultural theories such as Bakhtin, Benjamin, de Certeau, Anderson, and Siegel, Strassler argues for both a history "of" vision and a history "through" vision yielded by the practices of popular photography in Java. These practices, according to her, "reveal the larger currents of Indonesian history as they are refracted through the prism of the intimate and the everyday" (28).

As for organization goes, Strassler divides her book into six chapters. The first chapter largely discusses the history of amateur photography and the role of Chinese-Indonesians in the development of amateur photography. Here, Strassler adeptly highlights the intricacies and tensions in the role of Chinese-Indonesian amateur photographers as the emissaries who have to picture something "uniquely Indonesian."

In chapter two, Strassler looks at the genre of studio portraiture as records of "an 'informal' history of Indonesia—a history refracted through personal memories and aspirations" (122). While still looking at the role of Chinese-Indonesians in the development of this genre, Strassler proposes an argument that portraiture studios in Java function as landscapes of the imagination for its users. It could be landscapes catering to the imagining of a new nation, the aspiration towards modernity, ideal home, and social acceptance.

Meanwhile, chapter three probes identity photography ("pasfoto") as the Indonesian state's attempt to identify and classify its citizens especially between the notions of "pribumi" (native/indigenous) or "asli" (original/authentic) and "foreign" origins. Here, Strassler again highlights the formal exclusion of the Chinese-Indonesians from the discourse of nationalism and authentic citizenship, a practice that actually originated from the Dutch colonial policy in the country. Strassler then points out various cases of popular appropriations of this identity-photography by Indonesian citizens in Java such as its uses for personal, "honorific" purposes, from memorial portraits to tokens of friendship. Thus, "popular practices embed identity photographs in networks of social relations, structures of recognition, and personal trajectories that exceed the pasfoto's state-assigned function as proof of identity and mark of citizenship" (163).

In chapter four—my least favorite—Strassler examines the genre of documentation ("dokumentasi")photography in Java. Analyzing such collection as family wedding album, funeral album, birthday party album, she suggests that this genre of photographic practice cultivates a particular "way of seeing" that "harnesses memory to the iconic mapping of temporal progress and homogenizes different kinds of family ritual within a single representational logic" (205-6). However, Strassler argues that this logic works to different effects. For instance, in wedding photographs, the emphasis of the documentation is on the compulsive reenactment of tradition (175-86). Concluding the chapter, Strassler suggests that the popular practice of "dokumentasi" involves diverse discourses such as colonial and New Order (one of the governmental regimes in Indonesia) preoccupations with cultural authenticity, Javanese concerns with proper comportment and affect, and globally circulating ideologies of photo-consumerism.

Chapter five analyzes the genre of popular photography as a witness of history ("saksi sejarah") in Indonesia. In this chapter, Strassler looks particularly at popular photographic practices by Indonesian student activists during the reformation ("reformasi") struggle in 1998-99, a struggle that eventually ended the thirty two years of New Order rule in Indonesia. Scrutinizing the Indonesian student activism within this period and its records of photographic evidences and then comparing them with historical records of the alleged coup of the Communist Party (PKI) in Indonesia in 1965 that gave rise to the New Order regime, she compellingly argues that both the student activists and the New Order government operate similar rhetorical strategies in justifying their photographic practices as “mythic narratives” of witnessing (235). Ending her chapter in a somewhat critical tone, Strassler laments the inability of Indonesian student activists’ photographic witnessing to move beyond the confines of “youth struggle.” As a person who somewhat “witnessed” the 1998-99 student activism (I was a college student at that time), I acknowledge Strassler’s view especially since the narrative of the youth struggle in 1998-99 has overshadowed the other narrative of accompanying riots that killed thousands of people and left traumatic effects for Chinese Indonesians.

As the last chapter, chapter six is wildly entertaining. Here, Strassler focuses her attention to the practice of photographic montage of an eccentric figure named Noorman, a retired veteran of the Indonesian revolution army. As a devout follower of Soekarno (the first President of the Indonesian Republic), Noorman believes that Soekarno is still alive and has given her a sacred mission—through mystical photographic divine radiance (“wahyu”)—to “straighten out history” (“meluruskan sejarah”) that has been turned upside down by the New Order regime. In order to accomplish this mission, Noorman thus produces series of photographic montage on the street walls of Yogyakarta—a special administrative region in the central part of Java—and particularly on the wall of his house. This montage reveals an counter-history the presidential succession from Soekarno—the Old Order ruler—to Soeharto—the New Order ruler where it presents the leadership change as manipulative and involuntary. By meshing historical documents and mystical elements, Noorman’s photographic montage—according to Strassler—functions as “a new highly personalized version of national history” (293). In the end, Noorman’s montage epitomizes Strassler’s ultimate aim: to show the double gesture that photography makes possible—drawing circulating imageries inward into the realm of the personal and projecting the self outward into wider circulations.

While I think all Strassler’s chapters are strong in general, I do find several inaccurate depictions of data or the absence of it, which I assume is more of the result of academic exhaustion in dealing with enormous amount of data than deliberate ignorance. For instance, the linguistic etymology of Noorman’s name that derives from Arabic not Javanese as Strassler describes (“noor” is an Arabic word for “light”, while the Javanese word for it is “sorot” or “sunar”), or the incomplete term to euphemistically label Chinese Indonesians as “WNI” (“Warga Negara Indonesia” or Indonesian Citizen) instead of “WNI Keturunan” (“Keturunan” literally means “hereditary” or “offspring,” but in this context it suggests the genealogical foreignness of Chinese-Indonesians). However, what I am most critical about Strassler’s book is her—perhaps unconscious—presentation of “Java” as a single cultural unit. She seems to discount the cultural differences between the ethnic groups living in the region, especially between those who live in the western part and those in the central and eastern parts of the island. In fact, when people say “Javanese” in Indonesia, it usually only denotes the people or the languages in central and eastern parts of the island, not all the region. Those who live in the western part prefer to call themselves “Sundanese” or “Bantenese” (here I wish Strassler had read Denys Lombard’s three volume work, Nusa Jawa, or Le carrefour javanais: Essai d'histoire globale, as it is not included in her bibliography). Thus, it seems to go against her own argument of refracted visions not to discuss the complexity of the term “Java” in her book. It also creates confusion for me while reading the book, as to what Strassler meant when she uses the term “Javanese” or “Java.” Does she mean a particular ethnic group/region in the island of Java, or people who live in the island/the island itself? Nevertheless—as I said in the beginning—my criticism does not dismiss the fact that the book is an important contribution both for the studies of Indonesian culture and of photography as media technology in Indonesia.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book quite engaging as both a photographer and amateur Indonesianist.....

[Benemint · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only had a chance to read a few chapters, but I would love to come back to it. I also encounter lots of personally kept photographs as historical sources, and the book made me realize that how the owners kept those photos and how they present them is a meaningful source of information. There are (inevitably) anthro-ish abstract embellishment in her arguments but she writes well.

[Yulianto Qin]

Pinjeman dari pak Mahatmanto...