Watching Chinese Indonesians through the Lens of Camera

Life narratives have been the object of anthropological studies for decades, as they are used for understanding societies and cultures. While the common method for studying them has been ethnographic research techniques, some scholars have proposed that photography and pictures can be used as a tool in doing the life narratives. This idea finds support in the field of visual anthropology, in which photo-elicitation techniques are mostly used in data collection. In this paper, I use a collection of photographs taken from 1972 to 2001 by Paul Piollet – an enthusiast photographer who has traveled extensively in Indonesia – as as a cultural inventory of the lives of Chinese Indonesians. Drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, I discuss how the lives of Chinese Indonesians are far from the stereotypical portrayal of the Chinese, which was prevalent during the New Order era and to certain extent still exists today. I show how these photographs expose the “unseen colors” of the lives of the Chinese in Indonesia, that is, the lives that the Indonesian society may not relate to the Chinese because they are the everyday life of ordinary people in Indonesia.