Chapter 17 - Urban Parallax: Jakarta Through A Street Photographer’s Lens

Summary

Chris Tuarissa is a photo maximalist. He fills his color-saturated frames from edge to edge. In one shot from 2017, a young boy takes up the right half of the image, his eyes, large and alert, staring past us. Snot streaks from his nostrils. His expression—open-mouthed, teeth bared—is not entirely legible. Perhaps he is distraught, perhaps excited. We have to wonder why he hasn’t yet noticed and wiped away the snot. Behind him are the disembodied legs of other children, climbing the ladder of a playground slide. To their left, are several more, one facing us, a few others looking away. A woman caretaker is handing out something from a tin. A man in a red cap stares absently towards the lens. Further in the background, a row of Indonesian flags, their stark red and white cutting diagonally across the frame, stop abruptly before a child’s foot. And behind them, we see the outstretched legs and arms of the Irian Jaya Liberation Monument, the most obvious clue as to where this scene takes place. It looms like a sentry over all the action. It is a scene of play, but it doesn’t exactly feel playful. The mood is tense, frenetic. The presence of the flags and the monument makes the image feel vaguely political, but if there is a message to it, it is not clear what that message is. The image remains stubbornly ambiguous. ▶17.1 ▶17.2

In another of his shots from the same year, a butcher’s body, cut off at the arm, holds an axe in one hand, a rack of meat (possibly goat) in the other. The meat, raw and pink, covers the head of the man behind him. A blue tarp, stretched across the background, stands in for, and blocks out, the sky. More subjects rendered anonymous. More everyday scenes made unknowable. ▶17.3

Tuarissa likes to play with depth and scale in composing his photographs. He often gets uncomfortably close to his subjects, so close we sometimes cannot make them out, his wide-angle lens distorting their relative size, then juxtaposes them with something else, often incongruous, happening in the background.