Sugarcane Blues Memorial to a Vanishing Past: Seminyak, Bali
Out of all the mediums in art my favourite must be those of photographic works and especially those in black and white. I think it is the starkness of the image and the manner of light capture.
Thought-provoking images abound in the ongoing photographic exhibition titled Sugarcane Blues at the Rio Helmi Gallery, Seminyak. In the modest gallery, some 200 meters north of the famous eatery Warung Made, 27 black-and-white works of Indonesia's top photojournalist Eddy Hasby are on display until July 17.
A picture is worth a thousand words or so people say. Yet many people often forget that it is a picture's ability to convey a wordless silence that sometimes makes it really worth pondering over according to I Wayan Juniartha.
In a pictorial narration eerily dominated by a dark silence - deserted factories, dilapidated buildings and lonely locomotives - Hasby has managed to portray in a beautiful and haunting way the decline of the country's sugar industry.
"Indonesia was once the second largest sugar exporter. Now the industry is falling apart with some 13 more factories on the brink of bankruptcy" Hasby lamented.
The rusted machines and rituals of the sugarcane farmers also speak about the loss of thousands of job opportunities and most importantly about a dying tradition. Each of the photographs reflect a fragment of sadness. Together they are a complete drama of a quiet despair, forgotten people and a vanishing past.
"I have carefully selected 27 pictures out of over 200 frames to construct a dramatic repertoire. A photographic exhibition is supposed to be precisely like that; telling a touching story through a coherent and flowing plot" curator Rio Helmi said.
The result is an exhibition that appeals to both the eyes and the heart that satisfies the senses and simultaneously provokes the mind.
"It's a heart-breaking pictorial elegy of Indonesia's nine million sugarcane farmers" Oscar Motuloh said.
An accomplished photojournalist, Motuloh is the principal curator for the Antara Journalistic Photo Gallery, a respected visual imaging institution belonged to the state's news agency Antara. Moreover Motuloh stressed Sugarcane Blues was an important testimony on Hasby's ability to break away from the paralyzing trap of the modern-day press industry.
"Being an industry, the media outlets have purposefully and consciously worked in accordance with viable profit-making economic principles which in turn could shackle the aesthetic freedom and creativity of photojournalists" he said.
"The courage of a photojournalist to maintain such freedom and creativity even when he is working in a commercial atmosphere is an absolutely awe-inspiring lesson" Motuloh stated.
Hasby, according to Motuloh was a fine example of that individual courage.
Starting with mainstream media in 1989 Hasby later joined the country's largest newspaper Kompas. He was the winner of the 1995 UNESCO World Photo Contest and 1992 National Journalistic Photography Contest. Despite the rush and demand exacted by the newspaper's daily assignments Hasby had managed to keep his aesthetic fire burning.
"Sugarcane Blues is an ongoing project with no clear deadline. I have no idea when it will be finished. I work on it intermittently, sometimes during assignments for Kompas but mostly in my own time" Hasby said.
It had been several years since he started the project in various sugarcane plantations in West and Central Java yet he felt there was still much more to shoot.
"I haven't even started in Banyuwangi area yet." he said.
Sugarcane Blues
Until July 17, 2006
Rio Helmi Gallery
Jl Raya Basangkasa 88
Tel: 735688