Carla Bianpoen, Contributor/Jakarta
Rarely has there been an invention so universally embraced and disseminated as photography. Every day we are bombarded by thousands of potent images in newspapers and magazines, and on television.
Not surprisingly, there a notion that the photograph has become our basic visual currency, its imposed aesthetic filtering our perceptions of the world and who we are.
And yet, this powerful medium continues to evolve and change.
Linked to computers, bounced from satellites and projected onto countless billions of eyes, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the reality we experience and the reality imposed through visual media.
Indeed, photography has gone many ways since its invention, but the image-making that breathes life into a representation is the understanding of photography beyond craft stretching to ideas, imagination and contemplation. Intimacy and immediacy shape our perceptions and sensibilities of the modern world.
In this sense the pictures in the exhibition at the Erasmus Huis, titled Urban Horizons: A Visual Opinion, offer alternative perspectives through the lens of five freelance photographers, each with a different way of seeing the horizon above the overpopulated, jammed and reeking city, Jakarta.
In fact the five photographers present the many dynamics that live side by side in Jakarta.
The black-and-white images by Arif Sunarya are like poetry capturing the beauty that never disappears, in spite of a harsh struggle to survive. A picture of a single man amid the trash of a broad beach evokes a sense of desolation, a feeling close to that of an outcast marking the existence of the urban poor. Yet another picture evokes a feeling of rest and recuperation.
This is the paradox found in Jakarta and one that makes Kemal Jufri vent his frustration in angry photographs that show the stark contrasts that exist alongside each other in the urban city.
It is also his critique on the arrogance of the rich and the mismanagement of the urban city. Timur Angin's color bursts seem to capture the passion of youth in their extreme obsessions, while Mohamad Iqbal portrays the reality of transvestites and Paul Kadarisman reflects on pain and the fear of feeling pain.
The pictures may, in some instances, be perceived as a documentary, yet they are trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than solely present realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in them.
If it is true that photography is a way of appropriating reality, then this exhibition may contribute to how we perceive reality within the context of a changing world.
Urban Horizons: A visual Opinion, photography by five freelance photographers, curated by Oscar Motulloh and Daryanto Wibowo. Erasmus Huis, Dutch Cultural Center, Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said From May 11, (7.30 p.m.), through June 4.
