Street Atmospheres: Photographing Worlds-in-the-Making in Jakarta

Abstract

Urban theorists increasingly resort to the language of multiplicity when describing cities, particularly Southeast Asian metropolises like Jakarta, Indonesia. Cities, they argue, are composed of worlds within worlds, fragments that fail to cohere into a whole. This is a useful model, but it fails to account for the felt specificity of a particular place and time. Every city has a distinct atmosphere that separates it from elsewhere and which itself cannot easily be defined. This photo essay uses a sensory medium, that is, photography, to evoke the felt atmosphere on the streets of Jakarta. It explores the potential of photography to reveal something of the feeling a place produces without reducing it to any singular set of circumstances or conditions. Photography, it demonstrates, can operate as a nonreductive mode of apprehending, a way of depicting the flurry of activity that produces worlds, without defining or confining the boundaries of those worlds.