#connectingtheworld #connectingthesouls

Today, everyone is a node ready to be connected with the world.
Photography as an art is broadly accessible and practiced as the extension of human memory. There is no time in history when events are easily dematerialized as social-media shared memories. The world is filled with a plethora of memory-nodes connected through the networks. Together, we make a fused sphere of converged memories.
Yet, that doesn’t mean that the world has a unified value of memory. The way we look at photographs is always filled with inner connections between us and the image. The photograph of my 1st birthday party consists of my personal connections. The photograph itself become the material memory of one-year old me and my mind is constructing the formal memory of the event. The connection between the material memory and formal memory of that photograph is a kind of journey. A journey in time and space. A journey that defines me.

The quiet, personal journey of my soul.

A journey used to be understood as a personal pilgrimage in the ancient time. This is the concept that I still hold until now. The photograph of an old man selling Coptic-cross that I took on the street of Cairo in 1999 is the augmentation of connections between my soul, my journey to Egypt, the representation of the old man’s soul, the expressive smile of the kid beside him, the battered texture of Cairo’s old city buildings and the photograph itself as a scanned entity that survived for 15 years.

The world has changed a lot since then, yet the same connections still matters to me now. Whether it is a journey in the remote Naga village (West Java, Indonesia) or the capital of my country (Jakarta, Indonesia), every journey is a journey of my soul connecting to the soul of the place. The thing that was personal is now mondial.

Every journey is a perpetual connections between the landscape, the people, the setting. Every journey is a conversation with the past, present and future of the place and every photographs from the journey is to demonstrate immortality in light and shadow.

All of these gather as a context that enabling my soul to connect with the soul of the place; the genius loci.

Connecting the world is connecting the souls.