Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java

"Refracted Visions is a genuinely marvelous work which merits reading and rereading."---John Pemberton, author of on the Subject of "Java"

"Refracted Visions is a tour de force. Karen Strassler has a sophisticated grasp of contemporary theories of representation in both anthropology and photography studies, a deep and carefully attentive ethnographic eye, and a refined aesthetic sensibility. She limns the boundary between new historicist cultural studies and old fashioned anthropology with uncommon grace."---Rosalind C. Morris, editor of Photographies East: The Camera and Its histories in East and Southeast Asia

"Refracted Visions is a brilliant piece of work, beautifully written and characterized by a profound learning and engagement with Indonesian ethnography and a range of debates around visuality and representation. It will be hailed as a classic."---Christopher Pinney, author of The Coming of Photography in India

A Young Couple Poses before a painted studio backdrop depicting modern buildings set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque scenes in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Popular Photographic genres, she contends, cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal terrain of Indonesia.

Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and "tradition," desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. As photography's primary practitioners in the postcolonial era. Chinese Indonesian photographers act as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms. These members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. A richly detailed historical ethnography, Refracted Visions illuminates the ways everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.

Karen Strassler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College of the City University of New York.