Bio
Nicholas Hilman, Nicholas Raditya Santoso, and William Tan, are three aspiring highschool seniors attending Sekolah Pelita Harapan, who are driven by passion for photography, design and their city. Aiming to inspire young people in Indonesia to dream and achieve greater things, as well as to raise public awareness of the current state of the nation’s capital, these three young photographers undertook what was seen as unlikely by many and created their very own photographic testament of Jakarta. They transfigured what began as a school assignment into a published work of art, Moeka Djakarta.
Curatorial: A visual narrative uncorrupted by experience. By Martin Westlake
“The meaning of quality in photography’s best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system; … our overwhelming formal education deals in words, mathematical figures and methods of rational thought, not in images.” – Walker Evans, London, 1977.
Some 160 years ago, two British photographers – Woodbury and Page – became the first to photograph Jakarta. Then known as Batavia, the city would later become the capital city of Indonesia. The subjects of their sepia-toned albumen silver prints were of buildings, street scenes, and studio portraits of expatriate families and officials. J.A.
Meessen, a Dutch photographer working for the Netherlands Topographical Bureau, was also one of the first to document government buildings, as well as the prestigious accomplishments of the Dutch in the East Indies.
Much has changed since the pioneering days of the Victorian travel photographers – particularly the development of digital camera technology, which now gives photographers the freedom to shoot handheld day and night. Jakarta, too, has also changed considerably. Residents have observed Jakarta’s skyline transform — from a well-planned Dutch ‘garden’ city into a one of the largest and densely-packed cities in the world; it is over-populated, grid-locked, and polluted. It is no longer a beautiful nor a romantic place.
In June 2010, Nicholas Hilman, William Tan, and Raditya Santoso, three 15 year-old high school students from Sekolah Pelita Harapan, began photographing Jakarta as part of a yearlong personal project. All three were interested in graphic design and had a deep passion for photography. Inspired by many photo books in bookstores, they became determined to publish a book focused on their hometown. Some may consider Indonesia’s capital city to be a difficult place to photograph, but Hilman, Tan, and Santoso have skillfully managed to reach beneath the chaos and blandness of Jakarta’s surface by selecting their subjects with great care and attentiveness.
Seeing the city through three different pairs of ‘eyes’ gives greater depth to this collection of photographs and allows for a broader view. Though still young and in the process of learning photography, these young men have produced a fine set of images.
For instance, Hilman’s image of cyclists on Jalan Jenderal Sudirman shows Jakarta’s main street devoid of traffic on a car-free day: a rare, quiet moment on the usually busy and grid-locked thoroughfare. Tan’s photograph of two nannies walking their employers’ huskies in a housing complex appropriately gives an insight into the world of the Jakarta’s rich. Raditya’s shot of the kitsch creations of Jakarta’s property developers, taken from the rooftop of a huge shopping mall, could have misled anyone that the image must have been shot anywhere — including Saudi Arabia!
The most remarkable characteristic of the work of these teenage photographers is undoubtedly their clear vision. Their images are fresh and dynamic, managing to present a unique view of one of Asia’s most important cities through their youthful eyes. Jakarta as seen through the eyes of teenagers may be a naïve vision, but the concept creates a visual narrative uncorrupted by experience or encumbered by technicality. (*)
