Why Asian Photography?

Picturing “Indonesians”

Heri Gunawan, a Chinese Indonesian studio photographer, made this portrait of his sixteen year old daughter in 1998, shortly after student-led demonstrations forced an end to President Suharto’s New Order regime. In the portrait, Laura wears the typical dress of a college student—blue jeans—and her determined expression, headband, and clenched fist against a backdrop of a burning building evoke widely circulating media images of the Indonesian reform movement (reformasi). Laura’s portrait stakes a claim to belonging in the Indonesian nation through identification with a quintessential Indonesian subject, the student activist. It is, clearly, a self-consciously “Indonesian” portrait, but it is not possible to view this image within a strictly national frame.

“As if” national subjects

In picturing Laura “as if” she were an activist, Heri’s portrait calls to mind the dramatic scenes of protest pictured in national and international newspapers, and serves as a kind of surrogate for the souvenir photographs that many students took of themselves at reformasi demonstrations. Yet the portrait’s dramatic lighting, painted backdrop, and carefully arranged and static pose unambiguously place it within the studio portrait genre. Unlike journalistic images and student souvenir photographs that rely on an eyewitness principle, a claim of having been there, the studio portrait deploys a different photographic ideology. It assembles legible signs to form an overtly theatrical image that documents not an actuality but an unrealized potential, not a fact but a desire to participate in a collective historical process. This overt performativity—a tendency to materialize that which is unrealized and to make visibly present that which remains out of reach—is characteristic of the studio portrait genre as it has taken shape within the Indonesian context.

Heri explained, “…this [portrait] was my idea…Laura as a person who wants to demonstrate…I wouldn’t let her take part in the demos, only for the photograph. Actually she wanted to, but I forbid it because of the danger. In her spirit, she wanted to.” Imagining that the photograph gave tangible form to Laura’s desire, Heri nevertheless acknowledged his mediating role, explicitly noting that his photograph documented his “dreams” for Laura rather than—in any direct fashion—her own.

There is considerable irony in Heri’s “dreaming” of Laura as an ideal Indonesian subject. The image takes on more ominous associations when we consider that most of the buildings burned in the riots of 1998 were businesses owned by Chinese Indonesians, and that a number of young ethnic Chinese women were brutally gang-raped during those riots in Jakarta. As a Chinese Indonesian, Heri is painfully aware of his and his daughter’s uncertain belonging within the nation. One might say that it is only in the modality of the “as if” that someone like Laura can occupy the subject position of “Indonesian.”

I would argue, however, that despite indigenist ideologies that posit some Indonesian subjects as more “authentic” (asli) or natural Indonesians than others, the “as if” modality of the studio portrait is essential to its work in the making of national subjects more generally. In this view, Laura’s status as Chinese Indonesian does not render her portrait as an Indonesian qualitatively different from those pribumi(“native”) Indonesians whose belonging in the nation has historically been less problematic; rather it exemplifies and brings to the fore the always performative and necessarily mediated process by which one assumes an Indonesian identity— and the crucial role of photography in this process. Although usually in ways less obvious and self-conscious than in Laura’s portrait, studio portraits have long provided people an opportunity to put themselves into the picture of a specifically Indonesian modernity. As with Laura’s portrait, Chinese Indonesian photographers, often drawing on models from global and other media images, have been key mediators of these processes of visual interpellation.

Chinese Indonesian Photographers and “National” Appearances

Heri had crafted his portrait of Laura for professional as well as personal reasons. Since opening his small studio in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta in1984, Heri has been creating portraits of his family and himself as a means to experiment with new lighting techniques, poses, and backdrops. These contoh (“example”) images cover the walls of his studio, providing models for his customers. The portrait of Laura as an activist thus not only materializes Herry’s dreams and Laura’s desires for the family album but also models a possible pose available to anyone who enters the studio. In making contoh with his daughter as model, Heri follows in a long line of Chinese Indonesian photographers who fashion new appearances for their customers.

One might say that in Indonesia, despite its associations with colonial power and “Western” modernity, photography nevertheless has a “Chinese” face. Since the late colonial period, and especially after Independence, the majority of photographers in Indonesia have been ethnic Chinese. Oral research with studio photographers and their descendents reveals a consistent pattern of immigrants from Canton who established familial networks of studios across Indonesia and—although more research needs to be done on the pattern’s regional dimensions—throughout Southeast Asia.

In the postcolonial period, Chinese Indonesian photographers served as cosmopolitan cultural brokers who drew on their transnational ties as they helped craft the appearances of modern Indonesian subjects. In the 1950s, for example, they collaborated with Javanese backdrop painters to develop a distinctive iconography of “Indonesian” backdrops—featuring tropical landscapes, modern architecture, and luxurious interiors. These backdrops reinvented colonial-era tropical paradise imageries and reworked global media images of modern affluence. Ironically, despite their status as members of a transnational minority whose belonging in the nation remains precarious, ethnic Chinese photographers have molded—and quite literally modeled—modern Indonesian appearances.

Global Media as Imaginative Resource

Heri’s portrait of Laura places her within a visual iconography of the “student activist” that has an important genealogy within Indonesia. The image of the long-haired activist with headband recalls imagery of earlier student movements and of the pemuda (youth) who fought in the Indonesian revolution (who themselves went to the portrait studio to assume the pose of pejuang (fighters). Nor, of course, is the iconography of student activism only national; students who participated in the movement were acutely aware of the way their images would gain efficacy through their resonance with images of student protest in other parts of the world. As a recognizable visual icon, the student activist is simultaneously national and global.

In the portrait’s ensemble of signs, the backdrop against which Laura immediately evokes the banks and stores burned during reformasi riots. But in fact its history is more sedimented. In fashioning Laura’s portrait, Heri actually recycled a backdrop he had made years earlier, when he was inspired by scenes from the 1974 Steve McQueen film Towering Inferno. When he pictured Laura as a student protester, he recalled the Towering Inferno backdrop: “I imagined Reformasi...Solo is burning, Jakarta is burning...and then I remembered...this background.” Heri explained that he often designs studio sets inspired by films and television shows from the United States and Hong Kong, whose images sear his memory but leave no material trace. As he put it, “I have many leftover memories that I want to be able to see, to own.” Realizing them in the studio’s theater-space, he brings otherwise ephemeral and distant images into tangible presence. Culled from the flow of media images, such signs become detachable elements of a visual repertoire, available for recombination and use in ways that may or may not retain the associations of their ‘original’ sources.

Laura’s portrait offers an obvious example of the way that “global” media may be put to use in the fashioning of self-consciously “national” appearances. Heri’s recycling of filmic images in this and other backdrops he has used in his studio brings to mind the comment of an elderly Javanese woman I interviewed about the experience of going to have one’s portrait made in the 1950s. Recalling how studio employees would unfurl colorful backdrop after backdrop, allowing customers to choose among them, she commented, “It was just like the movies!” If global media provide imaginative resources for people’s acts of self-fashioning, studio portraiture is one medium for making those resources available. Studio photographers work to translate these ephemeral, circulating signs into accessible and locally relevant idioms, making the distantly glimpsed appropriable as accoutrements of the self.

Toward a Transnational History of Photography?

This brief examination of Heri’s portrait of “Laura as a student activist” offers some suggestions for how we might think about the question of “Indonesian photography,” and perhaps “Southeast Asian” photography more generally. I have suggested that we cannot understand photography in this region without addressing its mediation by ethnic Chinese photographers. Acknowledging the role of ethnic Chinese photographers means abandoning a set of tired dichotomies that too often structure the stories we tell about photography. No longer can we posit photography as a “Western” technology imported into an “indigenous” context; nor can we assume photography’s history in Indonesia to be an example of the “global” encountering, and either colonizing or being indigenized by, “the local.” The pivotal role of Chinese photographers as cosmopolitan cultural brokers also requires us to abandon a way of thinking that posits the “transnational” as opposed to the “national,” instead demonstrating the ways that transnational flows of technology, imagery, capital, and people have been integral to the very project of nation-making. Rather than ask what makes photography “Indonesian,” or “Asian” for that matter, we might more profitably ask how photography participates in the making of “Indonesia” and in the mediation of other imagined social entities and identities.

Karen Strassler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College – CUNY. Her book, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Postcolonial Java, has recently been published by Duke University Press.

References Cited:

Bertecivich, George C. Photo Backdrops: The George C. Berticevich Collection. (Exhibition Catalogue), San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 1998.

Frederick, William H. 1997. “The Appearance of Revolution: Cloth, Uniform, and the Pemuda Style in East Java, 1945-1949,” in Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia. Henk Schulte Nordholt, ed. Leiden: KITLV Press, pp. 199-248.

Liu, Gretchen. 1995. From the Family Album: Portraits from the Lee Brothers Studio, Singapore 1910-1925. Singapore: Landmark Books.