Refracted visions: Popular photography and the Indonesian culture of documentation in postcolonial Java.

Abstract

This dissertation is an historical ethnography of photography as a technology of vision and memory in post-colonial, urban Java. Based on ethnographic and oral history research in Yogyakarta, Central Java, the dissertation traces the multiple paths of a global technology as it has become integrated into the texture of daily life in Indonesia. It situates popular photographic practices within an emerging 'culture of documentation'---associated with what it means to be Indonesian and modern---in which people increasingly map their personal affiliations and mediate their relationships to the past by making and collecting images. As pioneers of photographic practice, Chinese-Indonesians are central to the history of photography and, this study suggests, to any consideration of post-colonial Javanese modernity. Each chapter examines the history, social practice, and visual authority of a specific genre of image, staying close to the habits and sensibilities of the humble professionals, skilled amateurs, and lay people who are photography's primary practitioners. The first two chapters, on amateur club photography and studio photography, trace how photographic practices give material form to the distinctively modern temporalities of modernity and tradition. The next two chapters, on identity photographs and family ritual photography, are concerned with how photography mediates new ideas of the individual in relation to citizenship and personal history. The final two chapters, on student photographs of political demonstrations and personal collections of images of charismatic political figures, explore how photographs entangle personal memories with national histories. In these popular photographic genres, widely circulating visual imaginaries and discursive formations refract and become redirected to the intimate purposes of personal expression and memory. This study brings together insights drawn from the study of archives and memory with scholarship on visuality, mediation, and technology. It offers new insight into the material habits of signification through which people come to feel part of broader communities and historical trajectories. Researched during the turbulent transition known as reformasi, but spanning the post-colonial experiment of nationhood, the dissertation explores how practices of visual documentation have been integral to the very formation of Indonesia and what it means to be Indonesian in post-colonial Java.