Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia by Karen Strassler (review)

Demanding Images is the much-anticipated follow-up, and in some ways the sequel, to Karen Strassler’s influential first monograph on photography in modern Indonesia, Refracted Visions, which made a significant impact not only in Indonesian studies but also in the field of image theory.¹ Demanding Images promises to do the same. Its starting point is the end of Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia in 1998, and over the course of the book Strassler examines the “crisis of authority and authenticity in Indonesian political discourse” that followed from the collapse of an authoritarian regime and the attendant “rise of a polyphonic and complexly mediated public sphere” (222).

Demanding Images will address scholars across a broad range of disciplines who are interested in the continuities and changes within Indonesian social and political life since Suharto. His reign remains an inescapable referent for specialists of modern Indonesia because so much influential scholarship of the late twentieth century was generated by anthropologists, historians, and political scientists who worked on the New Order regime. Many examined the close attention paid during Suharto’s long presidency to images and the staging of public rituals. Strassler’s analysis of image-events “after authority” therefore makes a critical contribution to scholarship on modern Indonesia. Her book also intervenes substantially in visual studies and image theory, including through its form. Demanding Images combines “photo-essay montage” with monograph, opening with a sixteen-page, full-color tableau of the key images forming the book’s case studies. These are reproduced again in black-and-white along the top of the chapters where they are analyzed, while the captions are footnoted to the bottom of the page, a schema that promotes flipping through and comparing images to find relationships between them. This format reflects Strassler’s theoretical effort to resist the historicist search for a “singular point of origin” for images in favor of discerning their “eventful trajectory” (14). Indeed, Strassler’s development of the notion of the “image-event” throughout this book challenges the material turn that dominates contemporary visual studies to argue that images are “events that happen rather than things that move” (243).

The “media ecology” during Suharto’s presidency was dominated by television and newspapers, but the collapse of his regime in the late 1990s coincided with the accelerating uptake of the internet, cell phones, and social media in Indonesia. Strassler’s notion of images as “unfolding events” not only adapts to the changing technologies of image production and distribution that attend this period, but also encourages us to ask “not what images ‘mean’ or what they ‘want,’ but how they happened and with what effects” (14), particularly, what occurs when images bring together divergent publics. To this end, Demanding Images teases out the tensions and contests between two types of image-events that dominated Indonesian political discourse after 1998: the “evidentiary,” which focuses on the indexical authority of images upon which democratic claims to truth and transparency typically rest; and the “ludic,” which eschews such indexical references in favor of spoof, mockery, and satire, and relies on the “powers of viral circulation and iconic proliferation” (243).

The book’s introduction (“The Eventfulness of Images”) establishes these key theoretical instruments, which are developed both chronologically and thematically over the next six chapters: from the protests and violence that attended Suharto’s downfall to the national elections of 2014 and beyond; and through examples drawn from a wide variety of image genres, including street art, gallery installations, stickers, posters, and banners, as well as photographic stills from online news reports, editorials, and social media. The first image-event that Strassler examines (in Chapter 1, “Face Value”), concerns the symbolism of money and its declining value during the financial crisis that precipitated the collapse of the Suharto regime. She develops the pun around Suharto’s “loss of face” with great lucidity and wit in her examination of how Suharto’s visage on money bills...