Family portraits in rural Indonesia: Photography and ethnographic knowledge

This paper explores a number of family and individual portraits taken on fieldwork in rural Indonesian villages, and how they can be used to reveal ethnographic information about the subjects. Formal family photographs are generally characterised by strict conventions and stiff groupings, suggesting that they are an artificial construction rather than a ‘natural’ representation of a group of people. And yet ‘natural’ photographs are arguably no more ‘natural’ than ‘posed’ photographs. In the former case, the photographer chooses the time and framing of the shot. In the latter, the subjects themselves exercise agency in determining how and when the photograph is taken. Thus family portraits reveal a wealth of ethnographic knowledge on representations of the self and agency in representing oneself to others. Photographs work dialectically with text, to allow various representations and interpretations of the subjects and the argument, to produce ethnographic knowledge that is significantly informed by a visual component.