110427 - Panahan Mataraman

This is a traditional archery competition held by Kraton Yogyakarta, where each participant is required to wear traditional Javanese clothings. They sit in a row while shooting at the targets, four arrows for each archer for each round. The archer who hits the targets the most within 20 rounds wins. Though I've lived in Jogja for 10 years and have heard about this competition many times before, this was actually the first time I saw it in person, and was quite impressed. Some of these men and women have mad skills!

110425

Didier & Regis

A little piece of wisdom from the graphic novel The Photographer (Indonesian version). 

Though not demonstrated in the above excerpt, what I like the most about this book is how Didier Levefre's photographs (mostly in the form of contact prints) are incorporated seamlessly with Emmanuel Gilbert's illustrations through various methods. Sometimes there are panels leading up to one (or a couple) strong photograph. Other times the page only consists of the contact print of an entire roll. It's a dynamic back-and-forth shift of first person and third person perspective, with one perspective informing the other to make a full understanding of the story. I think it's an interesting practice of how we can use and combine photographs with other media to give contexts to them.

110404

A Side Note

Recently, I decided to start a photographic scrapbook/journal. A real one. You know, with pen & papers, if you still use those. Why don't I just write it all here on the blog, you ask? Because I realize, with my disorganized mind, ideas or questions can (and often) occur in random and short outbursts. It's hard to recreate those thoughts if there's a delay in writing them down. I will often miss some points or completely forget about them. So I need something more immediate to capture these quick thoughts at that moment so I can dwell on them and think about them more thoroughly later. It's a bit like street photography too, don't you think? I know this seems fairly obvious, I dunno why I didn't start this earlier.

It's funny though, now that it's been years after I've abandoned college, I find myself doing the same thing I used to hate doing again. But this time it's quite enjoyable (so far anyway) since I'm the one deciding what to write on it. I guess I'm actually quite fond of learning, I just don't like being told when and what to learn. So, with this I've been taking notes of books I read or exhibitions and discussions I attended to, sometimes pasting old prints I have laying around and scribbling on them. I like that it's quite organic in appearance, with errors here and there, extra notes added in later in leftover spaces, etc. Compared to the sleek look of weblogs it's quite nice actually. I hope this will be useful later on, and work as a complementary of this blog. 

By the way, that book I'm taking notes on in the picture is Photo Journey Of Paul Kadarisman - Boring Happy Days. It's a book companion of his solo exhibition last year—which I sadly missed. (Updated: Was just told by Budi that this is a limited edition book) The book neatly encompasses his career so far, with photographs from his various personal works and informative texts by curator Alexander Supartono and Firman Ichsan. If you like the photos on his blog it's a nice book to have.