The black and white vision of Jakarta's Galeri Antara

By Jim Plouffe

JAKARTA (JP): Yudhi Soerjoatmodjo wasn't happy. He couldn't picture himself as a salesman or a businessman.

"That's what my parents wanted," he now says with some guilt.

That was 1985, when Yudhi was studying economics at the American University in Paris and the pressure was keeping him awake at night. His doctor told him to find a hobby. It was near Christmas so he bought himself a cheap Pentax and used a spare block in his university timetable to enroll in a photography course.

"I was 21 years old and had never owned a camera," he says, pausing to comprehend how strange that seems now.

"The first day I went out taking photographs, I knew I was going in the right direction. That night I slept like a baby," Yudhi recalls.

With the encouragement of an excellent teacher, he graduated to a Nikkon and then to a Leica. Nine years later he was appointed curator of the Galeri Foto Jurnalistik Antara in the crumbling Antara news building in Pasar Baru, Central Jakarta.

Like his clear-cut revelation of career path, Yudhi's favorite photography medium is black and white. He sees it and color photography as two separate languages and means of expressing an idea. But, says the 31-year-old, certain subjects must be shot in black and white.

To illustrate his point, Yudhi explains why he spent months working on a black and white photo-essay of a Welsh slaughterhouse while on scholarship at the School of Photography in Wales in 1990.

"To shoot it in color would make it vulgar," he says of the bloody images of entrails washing around on the floor. "Black and white leaves more to the imagination. It doesn't distract from the story or the dignity of the butchers," he explains.

Black and white photography isn't highly regarded in Indonesia simply because it was "the only thing for many years", Yudhi says. Once color film was introduced (DATE), many photographers in the developing country refused to use the older medium.

Even editors have become anti-black-and-white, Yudhi insists, citing a time when an editor refused to print his photos because it was "a waste of money to print black and white pictures on expensive art paper." Another time, his color photographs were chosen over his black and white photos even though he felt they weren't as good.

He was working for the now banned Tempo magazine as a correspondent in eastern Europe just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. His color photo-essay on Hungary was printed the next day, but his black and white shots of Rumania were debated for two or three weeks.

The Indonesian aversion to black and white photography may have deeper roots than the advent of color film.

"When photography came here(DATE) with the Dutch, it was used as part of the colonial instrument to make inventories of whatever they owned: the plantations, the temples, the kings, the population, whatever," Yudhi explains.

Photography was, and sometimes still is, beyond the means of average Indonesians. "The natives were always the passive ones... the ones crouching down in front in the photographs. The Dutch made a lot of images, but photography never gained popularity among the natives," says Yudhi.

Popularizing photography is now the mission of the gallery. According to Oscar Motuloh, who oversees the gallery for Antara, Yudhi was hired as the gallery's curator to make this mission a reality.

Yudhi had left Tempo in 1992, and had proved his suitability for the curator position with a solo exhibition featuring his black and white photographs of the Paris subway. "Paris Metro" was a success and taught Yudhi some of the skills needed to run the gallery.

Galeri Antara was opened in December 1992, and operated without a curator for its first year. Once Oscar hired Yudhi at the end of 1993, they increased the number of exhibits from one to nine and boosted visitor numbers from 45 in the first year to 400 a month in 1994. Last year Yudhi brought in more than 900 visitors a month.

He was able to increase the number of visitors by asking himself the simple question: What kind of photo gallery would I like as a visitor, not as a curator? His answer was a friendly and informative gallery, something that Indonesians would not be afraid to visit.

"Indonesians are afraid to go to galleries because most of the galleries here are commercial. That means you have to dress right. You have to have the smell of money," Yudhi points out.

Through exhibitions like "Padi", an interactive display in which actual rice complemented 200 slide images being flashed on the walls, Yudhi has built up a following among local young people and photographers. He boasts that the gallery now has a membership of over 200 and very close relationships with many cultural centers in Jakarta, especially the German Goethe Institute.

"I want to cater to people who are thirsty for this kind of experience," Yudhi stresses. "Living in the West, going to a gallery is like going to the supermarket, people just jump on the bus and go."

Yudhi sees the gallery as a "new infrastructure" where people can learn while interacting with photographers. The visitors "can even criticize them," he adds.

Besides staging exhibitions, Yudhi also plans to increase the gallery's collection of 250 images and publish at least one book a year.

He and his staff of three organize workshops and talks to encourage young photographers. For example, immediately after taking charge of the gallery, Yudhi had eight students explore "Old Jakarta" and present photo-essays on what they discovered. Their work -- everything from a graveyard to the Kota railroad station -- took on a melancholy tone, especially in the photos of the six students who chose to work in black and white.

Oscar says a fresh batch of students will resume exploring Jakarta in June for an exhibition called "Our City". With plans underway for a major renovation of the historic building housing Galeri Antara, Yudhi's vision of a user-friendly gallery is taking shape -- something new to keep him awake at night.