Reflections of protesting students shimmer in Jakarta's streets; three dandies with cameras slung around their necks pause briefly for their portrait in the early twentieth-century Javanese countryside; young women with headscarves show off their snapshots in “Chinese” fashion, newly permissible in the post-Suharto era; a young girl dresses up as a Hong Kong martial arts warrior and, years later, sports a red bandana, as a member of the Reformasi movement that brought Suharto down; studio backdrops of colonial “Beautiful Indies” landscapes, President Sukarno's high modern Hotel Indonesia, and generic Middle-Eastern style mosques visualize the shifting concerns and fashions of colonial and postcolonial Indonesia as they also intimate who Indonesians want to be when they pose before the camera – these are only a few of the more than one hundred photographs, including some taken by Karen Strassler herself, at the core of her masterful book Refracted Visions.
Generously illustrated, thanks to support from the Getty Foundation, the book's many photographs bear witness to one of the most powerful aspects of Strassler's work, namely, her ability throughout to keep the image and its crucial mediating capacities in view. The book's title Refracted Visions describes this crucial role of photography in the formation of social and political subjectivities and, specifically, how such formation must be understood as emergent within the interconnected space between the more intimate, affective, and personal dimensions of national belonging and the official, public, state-driven modes of national definition. Put otherwise, Strassler pays acute, subtle attention to the crucial aesthetic, material, and sensual components of nation formation and how the nation necessarily becomes sedimented and, as she puts it, “personalized” within the everyday ambitions, preoccupations, and sentiments of ordinary people. This means attending to what photographs do in practice, both as images and in the context of image making, and having an eye for efficacy rather than simply signification or, again, analyzing how the relationship between the “popular photography” and the “national modernity” of Refracted Visions’ subtitle is repeatedly and mutually shaped. Relatedly, an ongoing concern of the book is how images assume an increasingly prominent place in the ways persons and collectivities come to conceive of themselves as well as providing a preeminent means by which “Indonesia” is imagined in specific ways that correspond to certain possibilities while foreclosing others vis-à-vis its citizens and the larger world beyond.
In addition to an introduction and an epilogue, the book unfolds in a loose chronological fashion across six chapters, which each take a different photographic genre as their subject. Constituting distinct if often complexly interrelated visualities, these genres are: amateur photography practiced by elite Javanese and ethnic Chinese under Dutch colonial rule and by Chinese-Indonesians especially in the postcolonial period; studio photography popular from colonial times on; identity photographs; family ritual photography; student photographs of the 1998–1999 demonstrations against the Suharto regime; and photographs of charismatic political figures following Indonesia's Independence in 1945. Strassler's use of the concept of genre is highly supple, enabling what she calls a “doubled vision”: one that foregrounds photography's particular history and material possibilities while also attending to how such possibilities are repeatedly bent within a multitude of projects and the diverse desires of social actors. Strassler locates her genres within a broader representational field, providing examples throughout of the way different genres cite and inflect one another as, for instance, when studio photography mimics the informal poses of domestic photography or painted studio backdrops feature privileged national tourist sites that recur in the personal snapshots of elite Indonesians. Such genres, in turn, form part of larger visual economies that situate photography's practice in colonial and postcolonial urban Java within the transnational flows of capitalist modernity, cosmopolitan connections, stylistic and aesthetic influences from elsewhere, and so on.
“Amateur Visions,” the book's first chapter, explores the romantic aestheticizing gaze, inspired in part by the Mooi Indië (Beautiful Indies) painting genre, that developed within Java's first photographic clubs and came to codify an image of an “authentic” Indonesia comprising pristine tropical landscapes with rice paddies, laboring peasants, and smoking if tranquil volcanoes. If the chapter foregrounds the persistence of a vision of an idyllic, picturesque Indonesia even as, over time, it embraces other subjects like “traditional” arts and customs or themes meant to foster nationalist sentiment or promote state policies, Strassler emphasizes that notwithstanding the early urban amateur photographers' orientalizing, they were also amateur or proto-anthropologists, venturing into out-of-the-way places and engaging with others as they did. In this chapter, Strassler begins to lay out a crucial argument of the book, namely, the pivotal role of Chinese-Indonesians as photographers and owners of photographic studios and equipment but, also crucially, as cultural brokers who mediated between the cosmopolitan tastes of metropolitan centers beyond Indonesia, like Hong Kong and Singapore, and the crafting of “Indonesia” and its peoples in visual terms. Given the historically complicated, contested place of Chinese-Indonesians vis-à-vis the nation, one of the many strengths of Refracted Visions is to show how the history of this “internal other” is not only integral to that of the nation but critical to its very formation, hinting thereby at how the nation is necessarily produced from the “outside in” as much as the inside out.
Chapter 2, “Landscapes of the Imagination,” tacks back and forth between Java's early photographic studios and those of more recent times, analyzing, among other things, the development of an increasingly colorful and lively backdrop aesthetic. At different historical moments, such backdrops allowed those who could afford a trip to the studio the possibility of virtual travel across national territory or an engagement with the signs of modernity like radios, sewing machines, airplanes, and luxurious homes boasting staircases and glass windows. The longstanding practice of Javanese families of marking Ramadan's festive conclusion with a trip to the photographic studio allows Strassler to trace the changing appearance of mosques in studio backdrops. In a compelling analysis she shows how the identifiable local and national mosques of earlier backdrops tend to make way from the 1980s on for generic mosques with South Asian or Middle Eastern architectural features “suggesting the growing importance … of identification with a transnational Islamic community (p. 95).” Chapter 3, “Identifying Citizens,” explores the visual production of proper belonging and state practices of identification as well as how the requisite identity photograph on every Indonesian citizen's ID lends itself to “different regimes of recognition” (p. 145). Examples are the exchange of ID photos as tokens of friendship or, following Chinese-Indonesian practice, their use in funerals as memorial portraits. “Family Documentation,” the book's fourth chapter, foregrounds the crucial role of photography within the pervasive practice of “documenting” the family through the recording of its ritual high moments in codified conventional terms. In contrast to the stereotypical smiles and spontaneity sought after in Euro-American family photography, a perfect rendition of formal ritual process is valued here. This privileging of convention and formality may be one reason why Javanese family photographs appear so open to reproducing the characteristic forms of the country's extensive state bureaucracy, as when photographs show young children shaking hands at a birthday party in a gesture that mimics the “official” handshake of state functionaries so often depicted in Indonesian newspapers and on national television.
Chapters 5 and 6 address the differing ways in which photographic practice and history-making come together in Java. “Witnessing History” analyzes the role of student activist photographs of the tumultuous events of 1998–1999 that formed the larger backdrop to Strassler's fieldwork. Indeed, the book is dedicated to one of these photographer activists, Agus Muliawan, a friend of the author's murdered in the violence after East Timor's referendum calling for independence from Indonesia, and the source of some of the most haunting photographs in the book. The powerful status ascribed to these photographs as both witnesses of and documents of “history-in-the-making,” and the moral agency and vision attributed to their student makers, meant that they were seen as capable of extending the original act of witnessing beyond this charged if singular moment, thereby collectivizing the experience and historical potency of Indonesia's dramatic “Reform.” The book's last chapter, “Revelatory Signs,” shows how the general “culture of documentation,” where photographs act as “authentic proofs” of official history, meshes with a different strand of Javanese history-making linked to a tradition of popular messianism within the fascinating project of a veteran of the Indonesian revolution. Personal and national history blend on the walls of Noorman's home, forming an immense, expanding collage of photographs and clippings from official media, auratic photographs purchased in Java's streets of mythic figures and charismatic leaders, family portraits, and photocopies of miscellaneous documents that, taken together, offer a counter-history and dramatic “personalization” of the nation's official historiography. Following Strassler, this alternative vision relies on and thus also bears testimony to the larger media ecology in which photographs operate as well as the multiple means of technological reproducibility in which Noorman's project is grounded. It also epitomizes, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic fashion, the double gesture explored across the different chapters of the book in which circulating imageries suffuse the realm of the personal and persons and collectivities insert themselves into and are taken up within wider circulations.
It is difficult to do justice to such an original and finely crafted book in a review as short as this one. Besides Refracted Visions’ many compelling arguments, including the one that lays out the centrality of Chinese-Indonesians to the historical process of imagining Indonesia, Strassler expresses herself in clear, nuanced language that combines subtle analysis with vivid description and an acute eye for historically situated, ethnographic detail.
