INDONESIA by Raphael Blum

INDONESIA presents a singular collection of street portraits made in Indonesia (Java, Sumatra, and Maluku) between 2005 and 2019. The set of these portraits shows a series of urban types in relation to the space in which they transit, work, or live. The urban space—the public domain—forms an open studio where the photographer stages on the same plane people of different genders, ages, professions, social classes, and religions, which constitute the complex fabric of contemporary Indonesian society, in which tradition and modernity dialogue.

With foreword from Purissima Benitez-Johannot.

Born in 1966 in France, Raphael Blum studied art at the University of Paris Sorbonne and oriental languages and civilizations at the INALCO in Paris. After traveling extensively in Europe, Asia, and South America in the 1990s, he began to reflect on the landscape by creating in-situ works. In Indonesia, he worked on the forest landscape of Kalimantan and Sumatra. From 2000 onwards, in South America, Southeast Asia, and Paris, he developed a photographic project on the urban landscape, focusing on the image and the relationship with others, producing urban series or collections of portraits of passers-by in the form of work in progress. His Indonesian Series has been exhibited at the National Gallery Indonesia, Jakarta, and at the National Museum of Singapore as part of the 4th Singapore International Photography Festival (4th SIPF) (2014). His Urban Series has been shown at the MAC/Santiago de Chile, the Institut Français d’Espagne, the Alliance Française de Rio de Janeiro, the Casa da America Latina of Lisbon, the MAC/Salta-Argentina, the Alliance Française de Buenos Aires, the MUSEF La Paz-Bolivia, and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden-Netherlands, among others.

Hardcover
21x29 cm
176 pages
English & French
Afterhours Books
2023
9786026990754