I bought my first camera in high school with money saved busing tables. I was feeling quite sophisticated going into Service Merchandise and buying a Canon AE-1 Program. As I am prone to doing, I bragged to all my friends for weeks in advance. At the time I didn’t realize camera bodies and lenses were sold separately, so it was another six months before I could buy a lens and actually use my camera. Despite this rocky beginning, I have been a life-long lover of photography.

I went to Indonesia after graduating from college in 1995 and ended up staying for 7 years. I initially went to the Central Java city of Yogyakarta on a two-year teaching fellowship and taught English. After finishing my teaching contract, I began a circuitous career path, working first in the telecommunications industry, (literally counting the distance between telephone poles across West Java), then translating for the BBC and, my personal favorite, FOX TV. That kept me busy for several months, as the Suharto regime collapsed and riots took over Jakarta briefly. I then directed a small Indonesian research institute for a little over a year, and then moved onto my last job doing program development work with USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). I was there for two years.

The photos I have up show a bit of a cross-section of Indonesia, although I am not sure I have done a very good job in showing the diversity of the country. My work for OTI was focused on doing program development for conflict areas, and so some of my photos reflect this, particularly those in the Maluku islands. I tried not to go overboard on the conflicts, because there are vast portions of the country which are stable, and news rarely shows this stability.

The photos from Jakarta show a cross section of life around the city that I called home for the past five years. Jakarta gets a pretty bad rep as far as places to live go. Some of this is deserved. Pollution and traffic are miserable, there are no clean places to walk except malls, etc. But the city has incredible diversity (not surprising for a city of 10 million people) and even beauty in many of its nooks and crannies.

The photos I have presented here are a portion of photo essays I worked on over the course of my time in Jakarta. The north coast of Jakarta is home to Cilincing, where mussel divers eek out a living on Jakarta’s polluted coast-line. Senen is home to a solid middle / lower class population, and has a great pre-dawn, open-air cake market, a beautiful train station and layers of people living on top of each other in almost every inhabitable space. The Istiqlal Mosque, Indonesia’s largest, is home to an entire subculture unto itself.

I hope you enjoy the photos. There are plenty more where these came from. Anyone possessing an interest in the country and a high tolerance for windbags should feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to show you shots from some of Indonesia’s other regions.

Oren Murphy
MALD '04

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