Refracted Visions

At a photography studio in the 1950s, young women pose in a convertible roaring through a tropical landscape. In the mid-1990s, an amateur photographer plans to submit his photograph of children performing a traditional dance to a photo competition sponsored by an international cultural agency. A university student dodges police batons to snap a picture at a political demonstration during the reformasi movement of 1998. In "Refracted Visions", a copiously illustrated ethnography including more than thirty color images, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals. Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and 'tradition', desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography's primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. A richly detailed historical ethnography, "Refracted Visions" illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.