K. Basrie, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Setting: Tanjung Priok Port, Jakarta, sometime between 1949 and early 1950.
Scene: Dutch soldiers getting ready to board the vessels that will take them home after fighting to take back their former colony.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, a photojournalist on assignment for Life magazine, captured an enduring and telling image on that day.
Eight soldiers in ragged uniforms, cheerful smiles dancing across their stress-free faces, make their way along a pier, framed by a warehouse and a ship.
While the rest of his comrades are hand-in-hand pushing their cargo trolley loaded down with belongings, a boyish looking soldier hitches a ride atop the baggage.
At left, a stylishly dressed Westerner passes in the opposite direction but turns to share their good cheer, while some pribumi (locals) stand behind the group, too busy with their own business to notice the fun.
At a glance, the smiles of the soldiers could denote their hope at being home soon, or are simply a cheerful response to the flash of the camera.
Whatever feelings the soldiers had, the message from Cartier-Bresson is that the war was over and that everyone had the right to be free. More importantly, after the horror of the battle, life had to be enjoyed once again.
In another photograph by Cartier-Bresson, local staff at the governor-general's residence (now the Bogor Palace) remove a large painting of a onetime colonial ruler standing proud in ceremonial dress, a symbolic cleaning out of the old for the new of a free Indonesia.
It was the end of the war of independence, with the Dutch forced out of the country and their flag torn down, and Indonesian soldiers and guerrilla fighters moving in.
Leading figures such as president Sukarno, prime minister Mohammad Hatta and Yogyakarta's hereditary rule Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX seized the opportunity to celebrate the country's new status. People from all walks of life enthusiastically greeted the flamboyant, charismatic Sukarno on his trips around the country.
These momentous moments, captured by the renowned French photographer, are part of the Indonsie 1949 exhibition being held at the National Archive building in Jakarta until June 2.
Although 40 pictures are inadequate to illustrate entirely such an important and far-reaching episode in this country's history, the photographs -- all of which are still in excellent condition -- provide an explanation of the feelings, spirit and mind-set of both Indonesians and the Dutch at the time.
Thanks to the photographer's great passion for sketches and drawings, one can easily feel the touch of a surrealist in his works. Most of the faces of the people he photographed provide their own expressive looks. Unnatural juxtaposition blended with his artist's taste for composition, angle, background and choice of lighting escort viewers into the scene, to hear the sounds and feel the mood.
For example, an intense study of the picture of striking barong dancers in Batubulan village, Bali, possessed by spirits and violently stabbing their bodies, unconsciously beckons the viewer into its dusty air to find out what is really going on.
Through his photos, Cartier-Bresson also shows that, amid the turmoil of establishing a new state, life went on unchanged for many people, particularly those on the street, working in the paddy fields, praying at the temples and in Bali's remote villages.
Dances must go on. Temples have to be built. And if war left women unable to carry out their normal routines, like weaving in Bali, they could take over ""men's work"", such as painting.
According to historian Ong Hok Ham in his introduction to the exhibition catalog, Cartier-Bresson took a different view of Bali than many photographers of the time, most of whom were only attracted to the romantic, exotic aspects of the island.
Cartier-Bresson, he said, ""has a deep sympathy for the social life of the Bali villagers"".
Unfortunately, only one of the photos, showing West Sumatra, is of the land outside of Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bogor and Bali.
""He spent only few months here (between 1949 and 1950),"" explained Kunang Helmi-Picard, the curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition also includes a display of the Life cover story of Feb. 13, 1950, titled The New Nation of Indonesia. The 14-page report is accompanied by stunning shots of the daily activities of ordinary Indonesians, such as life on the Musi River in Palembang, fishermen in the coastal area of Rembang, East Java, sugar traders in Semarang, Central Java, and a tea plantation in Bandung, West Java, all taken by Cartier-Bresson during his visit.
There is also a full-page color picture of Sukarno, his wife Fatmawati, their eldest son Guntur Soekarnoputra and daughter Megawati, posing in front of a water-lily pond at the Bogor Palace.
Megawati, now the President of Indonesia, opened the exhibition on Tuesday (according to Helmi-Picard, Cartier-Bresson lost the negative of the Sukarno family photograph).
Born the son of a textile tycoon in 1908, Cartier-Bresson cofounded the Magnum Photo agency in 1947 and then traveled to several Asian countries, such as India, Burma, Pakistan, Indonesia and China, to record the historical developments following the end of World War II and the wave of decolonization sweeping the region.
Helmi-Picard said Cartier-Bresson was in Indonesia with Life reporter Robert Doyle, who died in 1956 here, and his Indonesian-born wife, Retna Cartier-Bresson, the former Carolina Jeanne de Souza, whom he married in 1938 in Paris.
The exhibition also includes 11 portraits of Retna, who was a renowned Javanese dancer in her day under the name Retna Mohini. The Cartier-Bressons divorced in 1965 and Retna died in 1988.
Cartier-Bresson made portraits, films, and paintings; one of his famous documentaries was Le Retour (The Return). In 1954, he was the first foreign photographer admitted into the USSR. In 1973, he gave up photography to devote himself to his first love of drawing.
""To photograph means placing on the same line of sight your head, your eye and your heart,"" he once said.
After Jakarta, Indonsie 1949 will move to the Sono Budoyo State Museum in Yogyakarta from June 11 to July 6, and the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Ubud, Bali, from July 12 to Aug. 3.
Cartier-Bresson, who lives in Paris and continues to draw and sketch, could not attend the exhibition but sent a short message to President Megawati and this nation: Tetap Merdeka! (Forever free). His photographs are his living legacy to us of that first taste of freedom.
