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  • Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java
  • Doreen Lee (bio)
Karen Strassler. Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 376 pp.

Karen Strassler’s first book, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, traces the history of popular practices and aesthetics of photography in Java, spanning the late colonial era to the present. Upon further reveal, however, the book is much more ambitious and political in its intention. Refracted Visions is about the cultivation of visual, technological, and political norms and attachments that allowed the state to identify individuals as state subjects, but, more importantly, allowed individuals to recognize themselves as modern Indonesians. As an ethnography of popular culture, art history, and social history, the book is rare, even unique in the field of Indonesian studies. Perhaps the most likely analytical comparisons that can be made would be Ann Stoler’s work on memory, race, and desire in the late colonial era,1 and Rudolf Mrázek’s Wittgensteinian account2 of late colonial modernity as a dreamscape of technology.3 Refracted Visions satisfies a gap in the literature of Asian art history and technological studies by charting the slow and formative impact of photography as a distinct enframing device for Indonesian identity.

The triadic relationship between state, citizen, and a foreign element (the camera-object, the Chinese photographer) as it played out in the technological climb towards perfect identification takes on a collaborative tone in Refracted Visions. The book exposes modern statecraft’s dependence on asserting the gaze of the state, the complicity of ordinary people in maintaining the hold of the state’s recognition of their selves, and the necessarily mediating and mediated role of minority Indonesian Chinese citizens engaged in photography. The interests of the state and the individual are both represented in the belief that “Yes, the photo is me. I am that image”; a set of statements that has immense cultural connotations in a place such as Java, perhaps the island most culturally and politically identified with the nation-state. Without troubling the distance between Javanese and Indonesian identity, Java has time and time again been the place where people gathered and events of historical import were recorded. Culturally dominant Java set the standard for the rest of the country to follow, a trope that Suharto’s New Order was not reticent about exploiting. Strassler’s choice of fieldwork location made ethnographic and pragmatic sense—going into the center of the center (Yogyakarta as cultural center of Java and the center of student activism in the late 1990s) in order to interrogate the production and maintenance of normality and nationality. [End Page 229]

For an historical and ethnographic project on the social significance of photography, Strassler’s timing was fortuitous. Strassler was already at her fieldwork site in November 1998, following the economic collapse triggered by the regional Asian Crisis of 1997 and a series of ongoing political crises that pitted the old guard of Suharto’s New Order dictatorship against a rising wave of popular politics, student activism, and religious, separatist, and ethnic violence across the archipelago. Marshall McLuhan’s worn adage—“the medium is the message,” conjuring a futuristic and technologized society where all communication had been rendered transparent as mediation, medium, and idea became one—appeared relevant once more. Photography became a powerful tool for Reformasi-minded individuals to redress past silences, with charged photographs appearing in the mass media and in numerous exhibitions and alternative venues. The book is thus divided by a back-and-forth motion with this fieldwork time of photographic hope and transparency at the center (indeed the Reformasi chapter is located in the middle of the book)—a motion that illustrates John Berger’s insight on how the photograph works upon memory in a radial rather than linear fashion. The book takes up public and private photography, archival and contemporary photography, and the politics of the nation in the present and the past. It maintains a conceptual momentum as well; six chapters moving steadily from the most popular and detached to the most personal and political of photography’s potentials.

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