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Exhibition of surreal Bali

A rare sight: Family members carry the remains of Tjokorde Istri Muter up the cremation tower during one of the last Ubud royal family cremations

I Wayan Juniartha (The Jakarta Post)
Jimbaran
Thu, December 30, 2010

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Exhibition of surreal Bali

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span class="inline inline-left">A rare sight: Family members carry the remains of Tjokorde Istri Muter up the cremation tower during one of the last Ubud royal family cremations. Many people admire John Stanmeyer for the award-winning images he creates, others are in awe of his seemingly infinite raw energy.

I adore him for that innocent, almost childish, enthusiasm he always displays whenever he takes on a new assignment, embraces a new culture, or shakes hands with new people.

That enthusiasm lends him, and his works, an aura of freshness, and gives off the impression of somebody or something alive and kicking.

That enthusiasm is also very infectious, relentlessly drawing everybody around him to accept that the world is not a very bad place, after all.

That enthusiasm and two other personal traits, humility and genuine affection for people as well as friendship, are the keys that have opened doors for him into many cultures and different terrains.

Humility prevents Stanmeyer from looking down on numerous so-called “primitive” or “inferior” cultures and communities he has encountered while on assignment for Time or National Geographic across more than 70 nations.

Spiritual island: A priest blesses a family with holy water after praying on a rock facing the ocean at Batubolong temple on Canggu beach.
Spiritual island: A priest blesses a family with holy water after praying on a rock facing the ocean at Batubolong temple on Canggu beach. His friendship with the proponents of those “primitive” or “inferior” cultures earns him insights, understandings and opportunities that frequently elude other photographers. His enthusiasm enables him to identify with the subjects he captures and the problems he narrates.

The results of these three personal traits working in tandem with his skillful mastery of photographic techniques are images of stunning beauty, eloquent composition and, most importantly, critical questions.

Island of the Spirits, his newly launched book, is a compilation of precisely these images. The book contained 56 black and white images, selected by former Time magazine picture editor Lisa Botos from 500 images shot by Stanmeyer during his many assignments and five year-long stay in Bali.

All images were shot with a Holga, a cheap, plastic, made-in-China medium format camera that lures many top photographers due to the surrealistic and impressionistic images it produces. Holga’s distortions, blurs, light leaks, and vignetting work beautifully to enhance and highlight the island as a spiritual landscape where the seen and the unseen, the human and the spirits, the sacred and the profane, are constantly in the process of uniting and detaching on a daily basis and in Balinese daily life.

Esthetically speaking, Stanmeyer has succeeded in capturing the surrealistic nature of Bali’s spiritual landscape.

Island of the Spirits, however, is not merely about esthetics. The book’s foreword, written by Wade Davis — an eminent anthropologist who has never had the good fortune of visiting Bali — eloquently and convincingly poses questions on the importance and the future of Bali, and other island cultures in the world.

Trance: Two men in a trance point krises into the air during a Melasti ceremony on Petitenget beach.
Trance: Two men in a trance point krises into the air during a Melasti ceremony on Petitenget beach. “A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of aprotective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined,” Davis wrote of the difference between the modern world and the traditional one.

In the closing paragraph, Davis states that the Balinese remind us every day that the planet is not simply a commodity; a raw resource to be consumed at our whim and that there are indeed other ways of
thinking, other ways of being, and other ways of orienting ourselves in social, spiritual and ecological spaces.

Stanmeyer has embraced these other ways. For that the doors into the spiritual landscape of this island have been left opened for him.

Island of the Spirits is the personal account of his exhilarating journey across that landscape.

— Photos by John Stanmeyer


Island of the Spirits

Exhibition of photography works by John Stanmeyer
Dec. 9, 2010 - Jan. 3, 2011
Ganesha Gallery
Four Seasons Resort at Jimbaran Bay
Phone: 0361-701010
email: luh.resiki@fourseasons.com

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