Chapter 14 - Outsiders

Summary

For at least a thousand years, the Indonesian archipelago has stood at the crossroads of Asian trade. Any ship plying between East Asia and India, Africa, or Europe threaded its way through the straits lying between Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Sulawesi, stopping at provisioning ports to on- or off-load, supplies, trade goods—and often people. Expatriate traders and economic migrants populated the littoral settlements and eventually spread into the hinterlands, bringing their own beliefs, customs, and modes of artistic expression, creating the intricate social mosaic that is modern Indonesia. ▶14.1

But this metaphorical mosaic has some odd features. Some tiles are more prominent than others, seemingly out of place, while others, which plainly share the color palette and motifs of the others, lie outside.

Four photographers are examples of these egregious pieces of the mosaic. Rio Helmi, Jan Banning, Rosa Verhoeve, and newcomer Anton Gautama bring a distinct perspective to recording Indonesian social and cultural life through being, to varying degrees, removed from the national mainstream. Through their lenses, the seemingly jumbled and often incoherent Indonesian mosaic comes into clearer focus.

The social landscape of Bali is a blend of many cultures. And of the people from all heritages living on the lush island, Rio Helmi best represents the cultural mosaic of Bali and of Indonesia. The child of an Indonesian diplomat father and a Turkish mother, Rio is famously at home in both Indonesian and Western cultures. ▶14.2

Rio committed himself to a career as a professional photographer in the early 1980s, as Indonesia began to promote tourism as a source of foreign revenue. Even as Rio captured the “timeless charms of Bali” for the unabashedly commercial reason of enticing ever-greater numbers of tourists to his home island, Rio’s natural empathy with his subjects, who shared many aspects of his social and cultural background, helped him to create evocative images even as they gave his Western audience exactly what they wanted to see: the travel-poster version of a magic paradise isle with a charming people living their lives in a sort of artistic spiritual bliss. ▶14.3

Throughout the 1990s, Rio participated in a number of high-profile projects in which some of the world’s leading photographers— among them Magnum photographers Steve McCurry, Abbas, and Chris Steele-Perkins—were commissioned for books on a given subject.