Dilemma. Its a Greek word meaning two propositions, two choices. The visualization as horns came later signifying a choice between two options both likely cause pain. We all, no matter how wealthy or talented or lucky, eventually find we are limited. We cannot have it all because we are limited: by time, by resources, by physical limitations, by our ability to focus on only a limited number of goals. So, we make the trade-offs which we think are best.

I spent some time a few years ago photographing a small coastal neighborhood on the outskirts of Jakarta. I was there because the community had been inundated with trash clogging their waterways from villages lining the rivers which carry trash into the sea, but not before collecting in a veritable landfill in this seaside village. Alot of people who saw the pictures commented on how sad and horrible it is to see all of that plastic trash, so I wanted to give a little fuller picture of why this happens and why it is so difficult a problem to overcome. Just stop using plastic, or at least cut back on buying products with plastic packaging – right?

Well if it were that simple it wouldn’t be a problem. Here’s why it is. Plastic is a solution to a lot of problems that people used to have. Most people are too young to remember milkmen, but 40-50 years ago there were actually people who drove around in trucks delivering glass bottles of milk to people’s doors every morning. Glass bottles for something non-alcoholic, not from France or Scotland? Glass and metal were the only available containers for liquid products at the time. It doesn’t sound so; bad both are recyclable minus breakage, so why did people switch to plastic in the first place. There were probably lots of reasons, but I’m going to guess that weight was a big one. Think of the weight of all of those glass bottles and the additional fuel for trucks hauling that weight around.

Choosing plastic was an economic decision then. And it still is. When you look at much of the plastic swirling in the drains and streams of an impoverished place and what you see most frequently is little packets of soap, shampoo and other single use products. A sachet of shampoo in Indonesia costs about 1,500 rupiah (about US 10 cents) while a plastic bottle costs about 90,000 (about US 5 dollars) and even though it is cheaper per ml, the overall expenditure for an entire bottle is too much to spend at one time for many people. The remainder of the limited income has to be spent on food or rent or electricity or other necessities.

Plastic packaging has become a necessary choice for many, and one which has put people with limited resources on the horns of a dilemma. They don’t like being surrounded by platic trash any more than you would.

Back in my school days, I remember studying history’s great disasters, the wars, the famines,
the epidemics of this or that and wondering what it must have been like to live through those momentous happenings. I had been photographing the Covid pandemic on and off for a couple of years, and as I look back on the things I saw and heard and experienced, I’m trying to grasp exactly what it was like living through this momentous time. It’s hard to know what to make of it all. The empty streets, the busy graveyards, the howling noise of ambulances and the blare of endless statistics. They all say something in their own tragic inflection about that time.

As someone who looks at these happenings mostly visually, I’ve tried to ask myself which of those aspects is most telling. Is it the novelty of seeing peoples eyes but not their mouths, or the shock of seeing a crew in their plague suits walking down my street, the throngs of sick people trying to get into an overcrowded hospital; or is it the deserted streets and shops which signify for so many economic catastrophe? It all definitely created a surreal landscape in which to photograph. I may change my mind with the passage of time about what stuck out the most, but for now, beyond all that we can see and hear and read, lies the simple truth of the devastating sadness of families who had to say goodbye too soon to someone they cherished.

I spent days observing those on the front line who were hands on with all that death and sadness – the diggers of graves, and the transporters of the dead. This is not to downplay those on the other side of the frontline performing the daily miracles great and small that keep people alive. it’s just that the other end of the line is what this enormous disaster is all about in the end. So what did I learn from my time spent watching the holes being dug, then being filled over and over again surrounded by the small groups of relatives on hand to mourn too quickly and say hasty prayers? That grief is a weight. That enormous respect is owed to all those who were witness day in and day out to someone’s worst moments. Those who continually and viscerally confronted the statistics. How could they not become exhausted – not just by the physical labor – but by the continual miasma of grief as they catch a quick rest, eat a quick lunch, as they lay down the shovel to print in marker as best the can the name and todays date on the grave marker of the next victim. It is a heavy weight. Speaking to some of the grave diggers, they told me that it is a difficult part of their job, seeing distraught mothers and daughters and husbands. But even more so they said is the heaviness of handling the burial of a casket that comes with no family at all. As I focused on all of this, watching and photographing, a voice in the back of my head continually reminded me, keep a bit of distance or you’ll fall in the hole. You have to keep a bit of distance or you’ll collapse with the weight of those holes.

Covid Time – 2020-2021

Which brings me to something that gave me a similar feeling… the slow motion disaster. There is a place along the North coast of Central Java where the land is sinking into the sea at the astonishing rate of 8-10 cm (3-4 inches) per year. People living in homes close to the beach, over the course of less than 10 years, became people living in homes in the surf.

Did this man imagine 8 years ago that he would be shoring up his house every night with sandbags and with doors and windows nailed shut against the waves. I don’t believe that he did.

He was likely concerned, as we all are, with what was happening right then, that minute, the immediate things. But just at the edge of perception, perhaps he senses the full moon high tide is a bit closer, and that the sound of the waves suddenly seems louder now. But, he must hurry back to the immediate, a child is sick, there’s a wedding in the village, the jasmine needs to be harvested. This is the level that most of us are attuned to. Chasing the second hand around the clock, attending to the changes which happen from moment to moment. But there is also an hour hand, which sweeps just as relentlessly, but whose movement we cannot clearly see.

Its been a while since I wrote anything here. I got a bit distracted by the stampede to social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter … they’re all fun, and they certainly have reach, but all-in-all I think its a bit confining to adapt your ideas to a template built for speed and not contemplation. I miss context, and purposeful ambiguity, and surprises. All of which seem to have become a bit scarce. So, “here we are now, entertain us”:

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(Click image for large view)

Though its hard to see it among the sprawl, Jakarta is a delta city, built on the low flat floodplains of the Ciliwung and numerous smaller rivers flowing down from the mountains south of the city.  Among the sprawl and smack in the middle of this floodplain sits Bukit Duri, a neighborhood bounded, and sometimes submerged by the Ciliwung river.  Its a lively place with an active community center, small businesses, and neighbors from all walks of life who enjoy their shared community.  The homes here are a mix of solid brick homes with brightly painted walls; and makeshift housing with little or no furniture and thin plywood walls.  Its a neighborhood like many others along Jakarta’s rivers.  The position of these neighborhoods hard by the banks of the Ciliwung makes them prone to massive flooding during the rainy season which in turn causes flooding in the rest of the city.  Because of annual massive flooding, the Jakarta government has decided to clean up the city’s chaotic infrastructure along the riverways and other parts of the city’s jumble of informal housing.  And this has meant that the residents of places like Bukit Duri who have been paying rent, paying electricity bills for decades face a very unfair situation.  The government’s argument that these neighborhoods along the riverways are just makeshift squatter camps is belied by the fact that they are officially connected to the city’s power grid, and that many of the residents can show documentation of their rental payments or even ownership of their homes.  And yet, the heart of this lively community has been gutted. Excavators and police descended on Bukit Duri and demolished the riverbank housing there, after forcing residents to move to low cost housing in an area far north of  their former neighborhood. Small businesses and services will have to somehow rebuild in the apartment complex; no easy task if your business is raising chickens or cooking street food for your open air stall.  Its clear that the government must do something to improve aging and disorderly infrastructure, and though they are improving the way they evict these riverfront communities, the result is still heartbreaking – to watch the home which provided you shelter and comfort for your entire life disappear instantly in the roar of an engine and a puff of smoke is a terrible thing.

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(click the image for larger view)

Indonesa’s coal heartland in Eastern Kalimantan was a hub of big money activity during the global commodities boom of the first decade of the 2000’s driven largely by coal and palm oil output.  Big housing projects, glitzy malls, even an amusement park were built during the heyday as coal continually reached new highs over the decade.  But as the boom came to an end, the region has experienced a huge loss of employment and many of the plans made when prices were reaching their peak have been put on hold or have been made obsolete by the new economic dictates of an era of sharply lower commodities prices. I travelled there to see the contours of a place shaped by asset bubble dynamics.

I really enjoyed this.  I was shooting a brothel area in East Kalimantan and trying to negotiate how much the women working in the brothel would allow me to photograph when their pet cat crossed the floor of the bar leading to the brothel area

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click image for the full gallery

For 30-40 dollars a month Sunita rents a small dark and airless room crammed in amongst dozens of others underneath a highway bridge in central Jakarta.  Many of her neighbors have been living there for nearly 10 years, and many work for the city government as street sweepers.  Several months ago they were told that they would have to leave, though most cannot afford the 70-80 dollars/month or more it would cost for a small and cheap but legitimate apartment.  Just a few days ago all of the residents under the bridge were evicted and their makeshift housing destroyed.  It’s a never ending struggle. Thousands of impoverished Indonesians come to the capital every year to find opportunities that don’t exist in their home towns where farming is generally the only way to scratch out a living.  But, Jakarta itself isn’t prepared for the onslaught and arrivals from the country often have to make do with whatever shelter they can scrounge up in unused public spaces alongside railroads and rivers and under bridges. The clash between the need to clean up Jakarta’s perennially flooded infrastructure and the shortage of low cost housing results in those with the least resources getting shuttled from one inadequate housing situation to another.  On the day I last visited, government security police arrived to tear down the community and accidentally set fire to the whole place (though I suspect, it may not have been entirely accidental).