Turning the lens on people at a cultural crossroads

By Dini S. Djalal

JAKARTA (JP): It's lunch hour at the Regent Hotel, and assorted professionals are milling about looking important, or at least trying to.

Among them is a young man in a particularly bright shade of orange pants. Passing a portrait of a Dani woman, her bare torso rubbed with earth and a bag woven out of bark hanging from her head, he hisses to his friends, "Can you believe people in Irian still run around like that! They're so weird!"

Photographer Poriaman Sitanggang, whose works comprise this exhibit called "The people we forget", has probably heard comments like that all too often. Poriaman knows the Dani, an ethnic group living in the Baliem Valley of Irian Jaya, is off the beaten track for the ultra-hip.

But he doesn't care because he feels it is his duty to persevere. "Do the elite who frequent these fancy hotels know about all the peoples in Indonesia? My task is to let them know. Even if the pictures have no impact on them, I still want to show them."

Poriaman has no need to be overly pessimistic for his photographs are ravishing.

Some are excellent on technique alone. The indoor portrait, Man of Irianese, is a brilliant canvas of natural light; save for the man's musing visage, dramatic shadows dominate the photo. Smile You are on Camera is also lit in sunny rays, in sync with the portrait's sunny laughter.

The studio-like portraits, set outside against a stark white background and taken with 4 by 5 inch Toyo negatives, also use natural light but with the help of a reflector (Poriaman's method is revealed in a photo showing him setting up his work kit in a village). The resulting images are unsettling -- the eyes clear, the expressions unadulterated, the gestures honest.

Poriaman said the decision to go stark was intentional. In color, he said, the photos would not be as approachable. "Colors really affect people's emotions, they trigger meanings instantly.

"Also, in color, some of the images, like the kotekas (penis sheaths), can be harsh, even rude. Then the photos would almost be attacking, whereas I want people to come away thinking the Dani are our brothers."

Poriaman is right. In black and white, the unfamiliar images are rendered more sympathetic, perhaps partly because the esthetics of this format are easy to relate to. As extreme as the physical contrasts can be -- and some shades are so severe that white feathers disappear into the background -- the countenance captured always achieves a middle, humane ground.

The photos' emotive strengths are offset by balanced compositions. In The Three Young Ladies Posed for Thousands of Rupiah, the girl at right has her torso painted with white spots while her friends wear white bark skirts. The Old Man of the Dani shows feathers and ornaments in perfect symmetry with each other.

The Tough Lady also has a symmetrical feel as the pile of leaves balanced on the woman's head crowns a pole-like body. It's a great photograph, and perhaps even a great fashion photograph -- wearing only a bark-weave skirt, the tough lady's striking stance is potentially inspirational for the likes of John Galliano and Jean-Paul Gaultier.

The links to fashion images aren't so obscure. Poriaman admitted he was influenced by famed portrait and fashion photographer Richard Avedon.

"I thought Avedon's approach would be good for Irian," said Poriaman, who says the empty background brings out the details, imbuing the photos with drama. "I wanted to take the symbolic route, so the photos become meaningful. This approach is simple, but dramatic."

Dramatic as the archetypal images undoubtedly are, equally engaging are scenes of daily life seized by a sensitive eye.

Quaint photos

There are quaint photos of kids walking to school and playing volleyball dressed in the same clothes as children in Java. Strip away the "exotic" accessories and the Irianese, observers may reflect, are not so much different from other Indonesians.

Photographs of the Kurulu market reveal a community as comfortable in cotton as in grass cloth, and some denizens substitute Javanese-made sarongs for traditional headdresses.

Cowries and the Symbol of Wealth shows a herd plodding down a lonely road, their bulk dwarfed by the weight of a vast, brooding sky. Nature is king, the photo reminds, despite man's efforts to rule the land.

Poriaman doesn't forget that the Dani no longer live in isolation, at least not since 1938 when they were first "discovered". They may have nestled for the last 2000 years in the Baliem's awe-inspiring expanse, but now they rest in T-shirts and shorts, contemplating the arrival of another radio or other emblems of industrial life.

The New View of the Dani illustrates such inroads of modernity: austere wooden shacks with tin roofs, not to mention the satellite dish sticking out of the tall grass, seem incongruous in the verdant valley. Poriaman, who shot the photos over a 10-day period in February, does not assume that modernity is what the people do or do not want, but he acknowledges that a cash economy is overpowering the Dani's customary barter society.

It is at the markets, he said, that the conflict between tradition and modernity comes into clear view.

"You can see that concept of markets and competition is distressing the Dani. They take their goods to the market, but they don't sell anything because nobody is buying, the market is full of other traders. In the end, they eat the food themselves."

Yet if the market doesn't serve an economic purpose as it does in other societies, Poriaman said it helped channel a community spirit among the Dani. "The market is a place where the community can gather again, where they can function as a society again. Perhaps before they used to meet for ceremonies and rituals, now they meet at the market."

Hints that ancient societal norms are fraying at the edges are also evident in the photographs taken beyond the rustic villages. Becak has Entered their World is a quixotic, Cartier-Bresson- esque picture of youth playing with the three-wheeled pedicab. That these imports from Java have traveled so far -- Irian Jaya is 2,500 kilometers, or a seven-hour flight, from Jakarta -- signifies the government's determined efforts to assimilate the Dani into contemporary Indonesian society.

But the modernization taking place in Irian Jaya is best captured in the photos taken at Jayapura's harbor. Here Irianese jostle with each other to board the one ship that takes them out and around the province. The bustling scenes, reminiscent of the immigrant rushes at New York's Ellis Island, may look quaint, but the truth underlying the chaos is less so. There are only two practical ways of traveling in Irian Jaya -- by airplane or by boat -- and most Irianese are too poor to afford the former.

Poverty is what moves Poriaman. And teaching the public about this remote province's dire straits, exacerbated by the long drought, remains his goal. The 33-year-old said the Dani now struggle for survival because "we forgot them".

"We find it very easy to forget anyone who has no economic power or if they are useless in terms of mainstream society," Poriaman wrote in the exhibit's catalog.

His theme of "the forgotten people" applies not only to the Dani, but to other Indonesians ironically waylaid by the same development and modernization schemes that are supposed to help them.