indonesia

Even before the plane took off, it felt like this trip would be different. My family and I were on our way to Java, Indonesia. For my father, it was more than just a destination. It was the place where he was born, where he learned to walk, where his earliest memories were made. Malang, on the eastern side of the island, was once his home. My grandfather used to run a school there. My grandparents and their 5 sons, including my dad, left  when my father was five. It was his first time back ever since. His mother – my grandmother – had passed away not long before, so the trip carried a quiet weight.

I remember stepping out of the airport and being hit by that warm, humid air. Somewhere in that mix of jasmine, exhaust and clove cigarettes was something oddly familiar. My dad smelled it too. I think it pulled him straight back to another time, though he didn’t say much. I can’t imagine what that moment was like for him.

The landscapes, the animals, the sounds… the food: the kind we used to eat at family dinners, only deeper, sharper, closer to the source. And the people. Always open, always generous.

It was one of the first trips that really sparked my enthusiasm for travel photography. Especially photographing people. I’ve always been a bit shy, so in these early beginnings, I tended to keep my distance, framing people with a long zoom lens rather than asking for portraits. There was no plan, no real technique, just the instinct to point and click whenever something caught my eye.

Over the years, I’ve learned more about light. How to read it, how to shape it. And how to use the background to build a frame. My photos became more deliberate, technically stronger. But sometimes I wonder if I lost something in the process. That early looseness, that openness to chance. There’s a different kind of clarity in those first images. Maybe not in sharpness, but in spirit.

July 2009