International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

Karen Strassler’s REFRACTED VISIONS is a study of how increased accessibility to photography changed visual culture and understandings of citizenship in Java.  Photography was more or less an institutional medium during the colonial period, used primarily by the Indonesian government to survey and catalogue, and to present images of ideal Indonesians.  Visual representations of Indonesia changed radically, though, when cameras and other photographic technology became more accessible to everyday people and businesses under Suharto’s New Order economic policies.  Strassler looks to a wide variety of types of photography in Java to explain how this modern technology not only reflected but shaped postcolonial Javanese notions of national and individual identity.  Strassler uses refraction as a metaphor for how photography allows individual and nationalist identities to become enmeshed in one another like rays of light, arguing that individual idiosyncrasies and communal identities blur through common photography. 

Strassler begins with amateur and studio photography, revealing how the Chinese-Indonesians who historically dominated these fields communicated ideas of what it means to be modern, cosmopolitan, and capitalist to other Indonesians through their adoption of this technology.  While amateur photography and photography clubs developed idyllic images of an “authentic” Indonesia which were taken up by the government to promote tourism, studio portraits reveal a yearning for upward mobility often associated with the West and modernity. The third chapter, which draws on the author’s ethnographic studies of Javanese households, considers how identification photographs used by the government for surveillance have gained the status of portraits.  Later, Strassler considers the confluences and conflicts between modern imported and traditional Indonesian notions of documentation through collection, circulation, and display of family ritual photography.  The author then turns to the use of photography as objective evidence and subjective witness through her study of public displays of photography from the student reformasi movement, revealing how this independent documentary photography shaped narratives of this chapter of Indonesian history.  The final chapter explores the connection between photography, photocopies, and access to archival documents, all of which make it possible to display images of public figures in private households.  Strassler shows how both contemporary documentary approaches to history and the older messianic traditions remain important for Javanese displays of nationalism.  Ultimately, Strassler argues for the importance of using everyday photography to study the development of national consciousness in countries that have achieved independence in the 20th century.