Brian aRNOLD

Brian C Arnold has worked in Indonesia and its historical and creative cultures for over 25 years, having originally visited on a study abroad program in 1992. Working in the Southeast Asian Library of Cornell University, New York, he spoke with us about how he developed his expertise in Indonesia’s photographic scene, and projects he has done along the way. He is currently writing and researching the upcoming book A History of Photography in Indonesia: Essays on Photography from the Colonial Era to the Digital Age, to be published with Afterhours Books.

First of all, could you tell us a little about how you became interested in Indonesia’s photographic scene ?

As an undergraduate student, I studied on a program in Bali. I was originally attracted to the music, and went to experience gamelan first hand.  I became deeply intrigued with Balinese culture, particularly in the art and religion of the island.

 After graduating I started trying to develop a career in the arts; I set up my own darkroom from scratch and started working with a non-profit organization based in Denver, CO that was committed to promoting Indonesian arts in the United States.  I worked with this organization for about 4 years, all the while playing gamelan and making photographs.

 I eventually decided it was important to devote myself more fully to the arts of my own culture, and enrolled in an MFA program in photography at the Massachusetts College of Art.  After completing this degree, I began teaching photography and electronic media to undergraduate and graduate students at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.  I traveled back to Indonesia several times while pursuing my teaching, but for the most part my interests in working there were not too strong, and these visits were really just recreational.

In 2010, I connected with the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) at Cornell University.  This is a remarkable program, and the library holdings in Southeast Asian/Indonesian studies are among the largest in the world.  I took advantage of this collection to start a study of colonial photography from Indonesia. I had a sabbatical from teaching coming up, and I was thinking of spending time in Indonesia.  In going through the Cornell Southeast Asian library (formally called the Echols Collection), I was really just trying to plant some seeds for ideas to pursue in the coming years.

 Building on this experience, how did your first major book on Indonesian history, Identity Crisis: Reflections on Public and Private Life in Contemporary Javanese Photography begin ? 

I was awarded a major grant from the American Institute for Indonesian Studies(AIFIS) to develop a much more comprehensive study on the history of photography in Indonesia.  I spent half the year living and working and working in Bali, Lombok, and Java. This was an incredibly productive time for me, really one of the best times in my professional life.  I taught photography at programs in both Bali and Java, and met with different artists, curators, and collectors interested in photography. I developed some strong, lasting friendships and connections, and found an audience eager to engage my interests in photography.

 After returning from my AIFIS grant, I was offered a position as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University.  During this time, I curated an exhibition on fine art photography for the Johnson Museum of Art, and this exhibition later became Identity Crisis, which was co-published by the Johnson Museum and Afterhours Books, a great arts publisher in Jakarta.

Most of the work I did around this time focused on contemporary practice – photography was just really emerging as a legitimate art form in Indonesia at that time.  Identity Crisis seemed like a really great way to give shape to some of these discoveries and share them with the public.  I am deeply grateful to Cornell and the Johnson Museum for the opportunity. 

 My sense early on, really back to 2011 when I got my first grant to start this project, is that there is an eager audience in Indonesia for this work I am doing.  I don’t know of another history of the medium in Indonesia like what I am working on now, and that feels important. The support I’ve received from friends, colleagues and students in Java has been really fulfilling, and done wonders for keeping this project on track.

In your current research, you are focusing on the greater history of photography in Indonesia as a whole. Could you tell us a little about it ?

I started outlining and drafting a history of photography in Indonesia back in 2013, before I did my research with the AIFIS grant.  After Identity Crisis,Lans Brahmantyo - the director of Afterhours - and I talked about putting together a more broadly conceived history of photography in Indonesia. I am working as both writer and editor; it is a collection of 17 essays, I’ve written five of them, translated three, and commissioned the rest.  There are some really great people contributing, including Karen Strassler, Gael Newton, Wimo Ambala Bayang, Krishna Murti and Aminudin TH Siregar. I have also been working with museums, galleries, curators, and libraries worldwide to illustrate the book – both Lans and I are really committed to making sure this book is richly illustrated and visually expressive.

 In the West there is often significant focus on historicising and documentative work that has been taken of places affected by colonisers from the outside, rather than photography that is made by those living in those places. You however appear much more interested in what people born/raised in Indonesia have done with photography ?

Like many people doing a serious engagement, I am interested in finding and learning from things that seem new to me.  I do think there have been a number of positive changes in our discussions and perspective on the global history of photography in the last 10 or so years.  The great books compiled by Gerry Badger and Martin Parr, The Photobook: A History, made an important attempt to look outside the western canon and include work from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia.  And in the wake of these books, a number of other non-traditional photographic histories emerged (mostly focused on photobooks) – Aperture and Steidl published a number of great histories looking at Russia, China, Africa, and Latin America.

I do think Indonesia offers some unique opportunities to continue these kinds of engagements.  For the most part, these other books don’t address colonialism and how new photographic traditions developed after World War II in the emerging post-colonial nations.

 With that colonial influence in mind, how has the medium’s usages evolved over Indonesia’s many political and cultural changes, and what about what they are doing is most engaging?

 It isn’t possible to talk about photography in Indonesia today without addressing colonialism.  Sukarno, the first President of the nation, was very opposed to the West (which ultimately allowed for his downfall), and at one time made American movies and some popular dances illegal in Indonesia.  For obvious reasons, some of this attitude toward the West remained long after Sukarno, and for decades I think photography was often dismissed as a tool of the colonizer.

And yet, photography’s continued march towards democratization has changed everything, globally.  Anyone with a phone in hand these days also holds a camera, and they say there are more social media users in Indonesia per capita than any other nation. The MES 56 collective, who are based in Yogyakarta, represents much of what I find interesting about photography in Indonesia today.  While well versed in the history and criticism of photography, these artists seem to actively disregard much of what came before them, and are seeking to make photographs that are distinctly Indonesian.

Spending such a long time engaged with another culture and/or subculture(s) can have a significant influence on one’s own identity -- how has the time you’ve spent in Indonesia informed not only your own practice, but your own perception and understanding of your own and other cultures, identities etc ?

On several occasions, an art historian I work with at Cornell asked me about the title I used for the book and exhibition I did with the Johnson Museum, Identity Crisis.  I still feel this was the right title for this project (I did try-on a few others), but I also recognize this title selection had an autobiographical element, and that part of the crisis of identity I was suggesting was my own.

 Many artists, I think, start working out of a sense of alienation and disconnect from their culture, and thus look for new paradigms and avenues for self-expression and self-realization.  When I went to Bali for the first time in 1992, I know I went looking for new creative and culture norms and opportunities. This first experience had a profound effect on me (the relationship between art and religion found in Bali is pretty amazing, and really nowhere else can you find such a high number of artists per capita), and is really at the core of my personal creative well today.  A lot has changed and evolved since these first experiences, but I think the basics of it are still the same, that a large part of my attraction to Indonesia is to help me find new ways to think about myself and the world at large. 

Though photography has transformed from being highly prestigious to a democratising force, even today the Western photographic art world seldom seems to open its doors to work made in nations beyond Japan and China. How is art photography made in Indonesia working in a global context ?

Artist collectives are a large part of the art world in Indonesia, and have been for decades.  There are a couple of collectives in Indonesia today that are gaining global acknowledgement, and with some of the artists/photographers within them having really substantial careers.

 In 2011, some of the first photographers I met in Java work with MES 56. Many of their members have global careers, and have been included in exhibitions around Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe and the United States.  Indeed, the collective was recently the subject of an exhibition at the Foam Museumin Amsterdam.  

Another Jakarta based collective, Ruangrupa, was recently selected to curate the prestigious 2022 Documenta 15 exhibition in Germany, making them the first Asian curatorial board commissioned for this exhibition.  As a general rule, I think photographers and artists in Indonesia have a much better idea about what is going in the States and Europe than those with a more Western based vision know about what is going on in Indonesia or the rest of Southeast Asia.  I think many of the artists and photographers I’ve worked with in Indonesia have the knowledge and savvy to create their own critical perspectives for positioning themselves in a global context.

As you mentioned earlier, up until around 2000, the president Suharto instituted a strict control of creative expression through his New Order administration. How has his legacy influenced how photography and art expressed itself in the following years ?

In 2014, I walked into the Cemeti Art House(the longest running and most influential contemporary art space in Indonesia) to see an exhibition commemorating their 25thanniversary.  Walking into the gallery there was a large banner that read something like “Welcome to Cemeti, Defying the Indonesian Government for 25 Years!”  Suharto led an incredibly authoritarian regime, and censorship was a large part of how he held onto power.  Strangely – and I’ve had many friends in Indonesia confirm this – it was much easier for visual artists to defy censorship than writers or photographers.

Karen Strassler, an anthropologist at CUNY Queens in New York, wrote an amazing book called Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, that offers some great insight into the role photography played in reformasi (the student led revolt against Suharto in 1998).  I really don’t think you can separate photography from reformasi.  Digital imaging was just emerging, and one hour photo labs were in every major city in the country.  The protestors used photographs to communicate with one another and to usurp the state controlled media.  

 I also think any critical study of contemporary photography or art in Indonesia has to account for reformasi. There is no denying that Indonesia is more open than it used to be, and that global creative movements are having a much greater presence there.  And yet despite this there is still a great deal of culture conflict as the country continues to walk a fine line between being a liberal democracy and a more tightly controlled, authoritarian state.

As a photographer yourself, you also produce work in Indonesia; could you tell us a little about your own photographic practice ?

The American photographer Robert Adams, in writing about pictures by friends and colleagues, said something to the effect that “your own photography is never enough.”  We all look for ideas and inspiration in pictures by other photographers. To really be committed to the medium, I think it is essential to create a fully engaged practice, and I’ve always pursued photography in multiple ways – as a photographer, a writer, a curator, and an educator.  I’ve always felt it was extremely important to study the history of the medium, from technical, conceptual, and critical perspectives.

 It’s actually kind of funny how I stumbled onto studying and writing about the history of photography in Indonesia.  I’ve always traveled back to Bali and Java whenever time and money allowed, and I always wanted to photograph my travels.  I can’t tell a lie, my first attempts at making pictures there just didn’t work; I think it is very difficult to make

meaningful photographs of a place that isn’t a part of your daily life.  I started looking at the history of the medium there simply because I thought it would help me make better pictures, to see how others developed visual ideas and vocabularies making pictures in Indonesia.  I think because of timing and resources and few other factors, it all quickly snowballed into a much larger project.

 I really strive to make my creative practice and my photography a part of my everyday life – and that includes reading and writing, playing around with my phone, and working in my darkroom – and that is all done as an attempt to bring a greater sense of involvement and sensitivity with my daily life and relationship to the people and places around me.  I have worked hard to make Indonesia part of my daily practice, and as such it seems natural that it would become essential part of my work.

Given that this does all go back to playing gamelan in Bali, do you find much overlap between that and your visual arts-based work ?

 I knew from a pretty early age that I was going to pursue a life in the arts, and tried that on in a variety of ways before I found the right path for myself.  Because I was such a big reader when I was a teenager, I thought writing was my thing. Then I discovered music, and threw myself into it whole heartedly. And even after I discovered playing music, it took years before I found the right way for me to play, the music that best suit my temperament and style.  When I discovered photography, it was an immediate fit.

I’ve also felt a strong affinity between playing music and making pictures.  Some of this is really abstract and philosophical, but in other ways very basic.  I do think that when really engaged in any kind of creative practice, the feeling of elation or release is really the same, and that can from writing or music or photography, or anything if you are really involved.  Photography and music do seem similar to me in that both are a way of prioritizing a sensory engagement, and really with the intent of a deeper engagement.