Oscar `speaks' through photos

Zora Rahman, Contributor, Jakarta

Truth be told, it all happened for Oscar Motuloh by accident.

Oscar Motuloh never had plans to become a photographer. When he started studying International Relations, he actually wanted to become a diplomat -- "because they can go everywhere in the world".

At least, he canceled this plan, after he realized how formal and restricted a diplomat's life would be, and entered journalism instead.

When he was 30 and already working for two years as a writer/journalist at Antara news agency, a colleague fell ill and Oscar had to take the pictures for a particular story.

This late start in 1990 was the beginning of a remarkable career: Surabaya-born Oscar Motuloh today is not only chief photo reporter of Antara and director of the news agency's photo- journalistic gallery -- he is also one of Indonesia's most recognized photo artists.

His exhibition titled The Art of Dying, which runs until Jan. 26 at Bentara Budaya building in Central Jakarta, has been a success at an exhibition in Washington D.C. last year. It is the photographer's second solo exhibition in Jakarta in the last three months.

Both exhibitions, The Art of Dying and Nyanyian Periferal (presented by the French Cultural Center in Jakarta last November) have been the result of a journey to France in the beginning of 2002. Participating at a meeting with French photographers, Oscar planned to do a photo-report about the minority groups living on the outskirts of Paris. He also wanted to complete his documentation about graves -- both themes have long interested him. He has spent time photographing the people of East Timor and Cambodia.

These experiences provided abundant material. While the pictures showing the daily life of fringe groups living in Paris were exhibited in Nyanyian Periferal, the famous cemetaries of the French capital offered enough material to justify a single exhibition.

"Graves tell more about the life than about the death of people," Oscar said. "They document the history and the culture of a society, especially in Paris, where the cemeteries are bigger, the architecture is more expressive and the context wider than in most other cities of the world. And maybe we are just more interested, because there are so many famous people buried there."

In The Art of Dying, Oscar proves his eye for detail and a clearness of expression that makes a difference between a craftsman and an artist. His pictures show love by a CD on The Doors frontman Jim Morrison's tomb stone, oppression by a simple wall mosaic, higher power by a stone hand that seems to hover above Napoleon's Mausoleum and the wish for equality by the statue of French industrialist Charles Pigeon and his wife lying in bed.

"I always try to read and to make a visual outlet of what I see," the photographer says. "Afterwards I can revise it again - let's call it a kind of visual re-interpretation."

Not everybody has the extraordinary skill to switch between photo-journalism and art photography -- or even to combine both of them as Oscar does. But as he says, it was a long learning process from shooting his first press pictures to entering the art world, or what he calls "more personal photography".

"Although elements of photography can be part of photo- journalistic work, they have to be closer to the problems of the society -- with a more documenting character. And otherwise, although the idea, the angle and the composition of pure photographic works are different from a journalistic perspective, the picture still has to transmit a strong message."

Oscar is convinced that everybody can learn these techniques, with proper training.

"The basics that every photo-journalist or artist has to master is to assess the strength and the sharpness of a picture", he says. But he admits that there has at least a little talent to begin with -- the eye to see the right angle and the best details of a scene and the feeling for the right moment to release the camera.

Facilitating the training of younger photographers has became almost an obsession for the 43-year-old single man, who is teaching at the Jakarta Arts Institute's School of Film and Television and presenting photo-journalistic workshops at Antara.

"In my time, we had no books, there was no formal education for photographers (in Indonesia) yet. We had to take the journey of discovery all by ourselves", Oscar recalled. "Who else than us should now build something such as a new school of Indonesian photography?"

Oscar sees his photography as another medium for the messages he wants to convey. About the violence and the social injustice that people suffer in this world, but also about the joy of life and the hope for freedom and democracy.

"As long as photography is the witness for what happens in this world and is able to record the people's heartbeat that expresses the conditions of their life and their history, we can optically break through the jungle of borders and freedom is still possible."