STAKING HIS CASE for the art of photography in Indonesia, Firman Ichsan noted that there are many photographers who have used the medium as self-expression. Within the journalistic genre, the curator highlighted the works of Ed Zoelverdi, Kartono Riyadi, Rama Surya, Oscar Motuloh, Arbain Rambey, Julian Sihombing and Erik Prasetya, which not only fulfilled the requirements of their profession, but are also imbued with personal and aesthetic considerations. (A).
In fact, what Ichsan has given us is a list of eminent photojournalists that spans across several generations. For instance, Zoelverdi and the late Riyadi were the first picture editors of Tempo magazine and Kompasdaily respectively during the height of Suharto’s political power in the 1970s and the 1980s. The implicit restrictions on the types of photographs that publications could use meant that the younger photographers had to search for other ways to channel their creative energies. One direction that some of them have taken is to do much more expressive work. In any case, Motuloh is closer to this generation of photographers, which gradually emerged after 1985. (B) It includes Rambey, Sihombing and Prasetya. The latter is the mentor for Rama Surya, who is 12 years younger. Published in 1996, Surya’s photographic book Yang Kuat Yang Kalah (The Strong Ones are the Beaten Ones) subsequently served as the inspiration for several of the photojournalists who emerged right after the fall of Suharto in 1998. (c)
Looking back, it is not a stretch to claim that Erik Prasetya (b. 1958; Padang, Sumatra) and Oscar Motuloh (b. 1959; Surabaya, East Java) stand apart from the pack because of their influence – especially in the last 15 years – and personal vision in terms of their photographic practices.
In J project (1990-2005), Prasetya has amassed a documentary journal of a Southeast Asian city – in this case, his adopted home of Jakarta – that has no parallel amongst the photographers from the region. Tay Kay Chin’s Panoramic Singapore (2001) and Unphotographable(2002-06), while poignant and intense in their own right, seemed to lack the focus evident in J. Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Bangkok in Black & White (1984-99) more than matched up to the scope of J, even though it was primarily driven by intuition and not by a specific desire to document the Thai capital.
In contrast, Prasetya’s J consists of several integral sub-series dealing with specific topics like commuter trains or the Reformasi movement(D) that ultimately add up to his personal opinion of the city. His images speak of the need to move away from the fetish that most photographers have of the upper and lower strata of society, when most of them are actually from the middle-class. According to the self-taught photographer, the middle-class has become used to the idea of seeing something faraway and exotic.
That realisation first came to him in 1995 while working as a fixer for the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. At that time, Prasetya was a huge fan of Salgado’s work. He brought the Brazilian to the slum area of Ciliwung in Jakarta, where Salgado remarked that it was more beautiful than any slum he had ever seen in India: For the next 40 days, he went to Ciliwung 10 times. ‘Eventually, I knew I could not be like him. His images are too beautiful and more often than not, they direct us to images from the bible. I’m born a Christian and it is obvious that Salgado always works on big themes that resemble Biblical epics. And people like that kind of work, especially in the rich nations. Salgado said that people at Ciliwung had pride in poverty. But that’s only because he was there with a camera! That is not the reality. The problem is that he and photographers like James Nachtwey sell it as reality.’ (E)
Indeed, some of Prasetya’s early images in J bear the aesthetic touch of Salgado’s work. Despite his critique of the Brazilian, Prasetya has kept a few of these photographs in the final edit of J, perhaps seeing the decision as a way of marking the departure point from which he has evolved as a photographer.
The rest of his images however illustrate Prasetya’s intention of exploring his middle-class existence as a photographer. The Café sub-series started when he was still staying around Kemang, where some of the best coffee places in Jakarta were located. The section on malls started in 1996 when the idea of hanging out in a shopping complex was still a novelty. ‘The mall is like a small nation,’ adds Prasetya. ‘It is also the most democratic space – people almost seem to behave more politely. At night, it is also the safest place in Indonesia for a single woman. In a hotel, she would be taken to be a prostitute.’ (f)
A small but significant part of J includes photographs from Prasetya’s personal life. Without contextual knowledge, these are the hardest to ‘read’, although his love for cats and dogs should be obvious enough. His long-term partner, renowned writer Ayu Utami, also made a cameo behind a cutout installation of an NYC cab in one of his pictures of the malls. A ghostly image of moths that appeared out of nowhere during the commemorative service of human rights activist Munir Said Thalib, who was assassinated by arsenic poisoning in 2004 onboard Garuda airlines, acts as Prasetya’s tribute to a dear comrade.
And this is where J acquires its political poignancy. As an activist since 1977 when he enrolled in the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Prasetya has been intimately involved with the anti-Suharto movement. In 1978, when student rallies broke out across Java before the presidential elections, Prasetya was appointed head of the first-year students, making him the youngest leader in ITB. When the movement morphed into something else, Prasetya left it altogether and channelled his energy into mountain climbing. It actually gave him the chance to take more pictures, since most mountaineers were not good photographers. He became a freelance photographer in 1990, contributing his first photo essay to Tempo that year. At that time, the magazine paid almost the equivalent of a fulltime staff photographer’s salary for each published essay. Since then, he has persisted in doing serious journalistic work, although he also shot for advertising clients and film companies – at least until 1997. In terms of activism, he steered clear of it until 1987 when he met a younger and more daring generation of activists, including photographer Deny Salman, who is 12 years younger. That was when he rejoined the movement.
Therefore, when he was out on the streets of Jakarta during the Reformasi, he was not there on some kind of assignment. He was there, first and foremost, for his moment of greatness – to see what he and his friends had fought for over the years come true right in front of his eyes. At the same time, he remembered the stories that Ed Zoelverdi told of the number of headless corpses that he had seen during the turbulent years that led to the fall of Sukarno in 1967. And yet, that generation of photographers left no picture to illustrate the human tragedy. The Antara archive, for instance, was burnt right in front of the Indonesian news agency after the failed communist coup.(G)
Prasetya was not about to let that happen again. By the late 1980s, some of the activists could already sense that Suharto’s end was near. With the help of Rama Surya and Davy Linggar, Prasetya started running basic photography workshops for students in six different cities, so that they could make simple essays should anything happen. In fact, Prasetya was so persistent in keeping a record of the unravelling of the New Order that he even had a lady smuggle in a camera under her Islamic headdress so that he could document the campaign that Budiman Sujatmiko – a popular politician amongst students – ran in 1999 under the flag of the People’s Democratic Party while being interned at the Cibinong Prison.
Seen in this light, Prasetya’s Reformasi images serve to illustrate the way in which his life has become intertwined with the history of the city. The Reformasi has become a landmark in his personal and photographic life.
And when we consider the sub-series as a whole, it becomes possible to see J as an articulation of Prasetya’s ‘cultural identity’ to borrow a phrase used by Indonesian curator Jim Supangkat to highlight the shift of focus amongst Indonesian artists that had occurred in the 1980s. Since the 1940s, modern art’s linkages with the social and political conditions of Indonesia had given it ‘an unquestionable place and function’ in society. (H) By the 1980s, the search for a ‘national identity’ had become mere rhetoric; hence the switch in focus. According to the curator, this shows that Indonesian art at that time remained committed to the social context where collective consciousness was taken to be more important than critique. As such, there was a distance between Indonesian art and the avant-garde.(I)
On one hand, Prasetya’s decision to focus on the middle-class existence in Jakarta sits well within Supangkat’s notion of ‘cultural identity’. On the other hand, some of his images do oscillate between alienation and cynicism, which makes J somewhat avant-garde – at least within the curator’s definition of the art movement.
Theory aside, perhaps Prasetya’s greatest contribution to contemporary Southeast Asian photography is his idea of banal aesthetics, which he has thoroughly explored in J. He elaborates: ‘Jakarta is not a “beautiful” city, unlike the cities in Europe and America. You cannot approach Jakarta in the way Henri Cartier-Bresson approached Paris. Here, everything is not made by design. There is a lot of improvisation. In my work, the decisive moment is still relevant but not in the manner defined by Cartier-Bresson, where elements within an image have to fall into a meaningful pattern. That idea is actually based on the tradition of painting. But I think photography can actually expand our compositional possibilities because of its ability to freeze a moment. It means I can shoot without much control and achieve something totally surprising. It also means that I can shoot with no intention of making an element more important than another in the picture. There is no longer a point of interest within the frame. (J).
Several images in J seem to illustrate his idea of banal aesthetics, especially those on the surge of commuters along Jakarta’s clogged arteries. Also incorporated in J is the sub-series Mudik (2004) that Prasetya shot during Art ConneXions, an exchange programme organised by the German cultural centres in the Asia-Pacific region. Mudik is an urban phenomenon unique to Indonesia. It occurs before the end of Ramadan, when around 16 million Indonesians all across the country leave the cities and return home to celebrate Idul Fitr.(K). This is when they are no longer a nameless number in Jakarta’s working force. They become humans again,’ says Prasetya.
To illustrate his point, Prasetya photographed these ‘pilgrims’ at railway stations and the airport – all ready to embark on the Mudik – and he pictured the same people when they returned to Jakarta after the holidays. By doing so, he has helped the people who toil in the city reclaim a part of their dignity.
Somewhat surprisingly though, even with such an impressive body of work, Prasetya has never been featured in a solo exhibition. He is not bothered by it though. As he explains, he shoots not for applause. He shoots because, as a photographer, that is what he has to do. Nevertheless, he is keen to have J published as a book. In the last few years, he has showed the mock-up to many people. Every few months, the project seems to gather steam, only to be put off again due to any number of reasons. Meanwhile, Indonesian publishers like R&W continue to put out photo books that leave discerning readers moaning over the trees that have been cut for such meaningless projects. But Prasetya remains upbeat.
‘If you love your work enough, one day you will leave a mark,’ says Prasetya. ‘Young people tend to work when everything is in place – when the money is there and the concept is ready. It is not like that. When you shoot, you think of doing one good essay. And when you have ten good essays, then you can make a book. This is why I want to do my book.’
And when it is done, he will ask Oscar Motuloh to do his book, which may prove to be an even harder task. The negatives from his only photographic book East Timor: A Photographic Record (1991-93) are still tucked away somewhere in the Antara archive, yet to be scanned and organised. Worse still, Motuloh seems to have lost the files to Sound of Angkor (1997) and Carnaval (1999), the first two parts of the trilogy that he made during the unravelling of the New Order. Fortunately, he appears to have salvaged the images from the concluding series titled Art of Dying (2001). A small part of which has been shown again during the Jakarta International Photo Summit at the end of 2007.
A diploma graduate in international relations, Motuloh first joined Antara in 1988 as a journalist. When some of the photographers retired around 1990, Motuloh was asked to take over. Till today, he still does not know why he was picked. ‘Maybe they thought I would be a good photographer because I had long hair,’ he jokes.
In 1992, Motuloh helped to establish Galeri Foto Jurnalistik Antara (Antara Photojournalism Gallery, otherwise known as GFJA), the first public gallery in Asia dedicated exclusively to photography. It is located at Pasar Baru in a quaint colonial building that once housed the Dutch, the Japanese and the Indonesian press agencies successively. Since then, the self-taught photographer-cum-curator has been caught up educating and promoting other Indonesian photographers, instead of peddling his work to biennales overseas.
The following year, he employed Yudhi Soerjoatmodjo as the curator of GFJA, which further cemented the status of the gallery amongst the wider Indonesian public. On somewhat of a self-imposed exile nowadays, Soerjoatmodjo has been largely responsible for the emergence of contemporary Indonesian photography in recent years. At that time, he adopted a liberal approach, showing works like Ray Bachtiar’s Padi: Secarik Fiksi dari Rangkaian Fakta (Padi: A Leaf of Fiction from a Network of Facts), which utilised nine projectors and canvases hanging off the ceiling, in what was supposedly a journalistic space. That was in 1994, more than 10 years before the photographic experiments of Angki Purbandono were shown in a private Indonesian gallery as a solo exhibition. (L)
That was also the year when Motuloh founded the first photojournalistic education programme in Southeast Asia under the auspices of Antara. Today, he is the head of that initiative, the executive director-cum-curator of GFJA and the picture editor of Antara Photography Bureau. Understandably, he is incredibly shorthanded. But that was never an excuse for not producing work.
Like Prasetya, he was out on the streets of Jakarta during those turbulent weeks of 1998. But his main responsibility then was to organise the Antara photographers, edit their pictures and make plans for the following day. Nevertheless, Motuloh still made some of the most iconic images of that era. In Ghost Town, the tracks of a military vehicle frame an eerie view of a vacant Jakarta a day after Suharto’s resignation. An image of demonstrators burning the portrait of Liem Swie Liong, one of the richest tycoons in Indonesia, captures the futility of that very act itself. Entitled Great Tycoon, it speaks of the suspension of morality, which was one of the unfortunate by-products of the Reformasi.
In his trilogy, Motuloh departs from the visual language of press photography and employs metaphors to express his anxieties as an Indonesian photographer during those years of upheaval. His decision was a creative one. It was not made to evade censorship. In fact, during Suharto’s reign, no photograph was ever censored.
‘Suharto didn’t have any knowledge about the power of photography – he was more concerned about text,’ explains Motuloh. ‘Therefore, on the surface, photographers were free to do what they wanted. Covering poverty was never a problem. There was no need for photographers to work underground, unlike the case in the Philippines during the Marcos era. However, we needed to know where the government stood in terms of political matters. We had to be very careful.’ (m)
In Sound of Angkor, Motuloh uses the history of Cambodia as a mirror to Indonesia. From the 9th to the 15th century, the Khmer empire was one of the most powerful civilisations in the region. While the first Angkor temples were constructed in Cambodia, the Sailendra dynasty in central Java was also building the magnificent Borobudur. How did such a civilised culture descend into the malaise in which Cambodians turned against fellow Cambodians during one of the most horrific massacres in human history? At that time, Motuloh felt that the ‘violence’ within the Indonesian society was somewhat similar. Would it boil over one day? By the time he shot Carnaval though, Suharto was already gone. Euphoria over the Reformasi movement had become marred by the violence during the first legislative election in 1999. ‘That election became a fiesta, a carnival,’ says Motuloh. ‘In the end, the Reformasi did not teach us much about democracy.’
As such, Motuloh sees the Art of Dying as the anti-thesis of the movement. That year, he was invited to France to network with the photographic community while chaos was breaking out in parts of Indonesia. ‘By then, I had become quite pessimistic about the Reformasi,’ recalls Motuloh. ‘I was thinking a lot about the concept of death. It is actually a very universal thing. As an extension, the death of democracy should be experienced quite similarly around the world. Therefore, I started making images at the tombs of famous people in France as a way of commenting on the reality in Indonesia.’ (N). The pain that he saw in Rodin’s sculpture is turned into a forceful critique of the Reformasi movement, which had lost its focus with the fall of Suharto. In the concluding paragraphs of Soerjoatmodjo’s seminal text, he attributes the ‘incessant need to define and redefine its function and space’ as the motivating force behind Indonesian photography. (O)
In the case of Oscar Motuloh and Erik Prasetya, they have chosen to align their works with the social and political movements that agitated for change. With Suharto gone, how will the younger generation of photographers define their function and space within that historiography? Will it become market-driven, given the recent surge in auction prices for contemporary Southeast Asian art? Or will it be shaped by more universal concerns, transmitted into their laptops via the internet? Whatever the case, Motuloh and Prasetya have left a tough act to follow.
Zhuang Wubin
END NOTES
a M. Firman Ichsan, Satu Cermin Balik Dunia Fotografi Kita, in Bentara: Esei-esei 2003, ed. Bre Redana, JB Kristanto and Nirwan Ahmad Arsuka (Jakarta: Kompas, 2003), 280.
b Zhuang Wubin, History of Indonesia’s Photojournalism According to Oscar Motuloh, Grain, October 2004, 36.
c They include Edy Purnomo and Ng Swan Ti, amongst others.
d Triggered by the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, the Reformasi movement led to the fall of Suharto a year later at the price of widespread looting targeting Indonesian Chinese and well-off ‘indigenous’ families in Jakarta and other Indonesian cities. Instances of gang rape targeting Indonesian Chinese women have been reported. See Sandyawan Sumardi, Rape is Rape, Inside Indonesia 56 (1998): par. 18, http://www.insideindonesia.org/content/view/736/29/.
e Erik Prasetya, interview by author, Jakarta, Indonesia, August 2007.
f Erik Prasetya, interview by author, Jakarta, Indonesia, September 2007.
g See Yudhi Soerjoatmodjo, The Challenge of Space: Photography in Indonesia, 1841-1999, in Serendipity: Photography, Video, Experimental Film and Multimedia Installation from Asia, ed. Furuichi Yasuko (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2000), 148, which is by far the most detailed and textured attempt at the historiography of Indonesian photography.
h Jim Supangkat, Contemporary Art in Indonesia, Development Beyond the 1970s, in Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997), 169.
i Ibid., 171.
j Erik Prasetya, interview by author, Jakarta, Indonesia, June 21, 2009.
k The Jakarta Post, Editorial: ‘Mudik’ Travel Woes, October 3, 2008, www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/03/editorial-‘mudik’-travel-woes.html.
l That was in 2007 at the Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta, central Java. Angki Purbandono’s first ever solo took place in 1999 at the Centre Culturel Francais in Yogya.
m Oscar Motuloh, interview by author, Jakarta, Indonesia, June 20, 2009.
n Oscar Motuloh, interview by author, Singapore, June 28, 2009.
o Soerjoatmodjo, The Challenge of Space, 147
