But the tendency in revealing images about realities in different ways, and also the presence of subjective standpoint, can lead to the rejection of opinion about reality representation itself, because, basically, the perspective of every individual will be different in reading and formulating the images of every issue.
However, unconsciously, media is already at a certain level of establishment. It means that media can obscure the perspective of each individual in reading social problems because of its character which can manipulate the space, time and very contextual matters. This is the thing that is used by individual or group in underlining the desire and in spreading opinions, which will build a single (one way) understanding.
Technology as a tool (medium) can form single understanding and vice versa. By vice versa, it does not mean a negation of images distribution which full of single understandings, but how to put the opinion on the horizontal interpretation, sharing and reading each other’s problem without putting the difference or individual’s desire forward, like a playing vehicle in a theme park where everyone is free to have a voice and to access every detail of that vehicle. We have to put technology as a vehicle, like we put ourselves on so many problems and events.
The tracing (to observe), printing (to memorize) and distribution (to share) are easy to do with media technology. Just like what happened to the vehicle, how we observe, memorize and share the story to other person. For example, cell phone technology has potential to do those three things. With the availability of small camera in a cell phone, ‘we’, the user, are easily facilitated in capturing the event, documenting it and sharing the information about it. Pile of data inside the memory card, either internal or external, unconsciously becomes a very important event recording in reading the cultural environment and all its changes.
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The tendency of instinctively photography makes the result becomes more objective. This can be seen from the photography result done by children (4 to 12 years old), which is marked by its visual characteristic, i.e. the choice to compose shape and color. Even the choice of theme or the subject which comes from the local event is determined by their feeling at that moment.
The way children represent their imagination into photography result pictures comes from their environment by reviving their memories. In other words, this cultural environment is absorbed by the children semiotically and becomes language or visual disclosure style.
Seeing, absorbing and processing it in imagination form, which in the end is transformed into camera frames, make the children’s photography object seems very unique, because children’s awareness level of capture about event is very different from adult who basically is very constructed. The treatment of camera and the capture by children are not stopped at things which are the basic of photography itself.
Photography Exhibition by Children from Paseban which was held in Paseban Administrative Village, November 7th 2013—as a result from photography workshop by akumassa ad hoc, October 25th – 28th 2013—was a representation of photography capture by children at Paseban in seeing their village (cultural environment). The collaboration between facilitators (akumassa ad hoc team) and the workshop participant children happened in picture art making process and work presentation displaying. The latter became a performance art which was an integral part of photography artwork in this exhibition.
Photography Exhibition by Children from Paseban was a narration or fragment of event and instinctively captured objects through photographic capture. Playing with the medium and having unlimited way to the constructive frame became technical characteristics which were put forward, or unconsciously became the children’s uniqueness in this exhibition. *
This article has been published in the Art on Senen Border journal (Forum Lenteng, 2013). The journal is one of the results of collaborative work of the authors of some of the communities who were involved in the Project of Akumassa Ad Hoc initiated by the Forum Lenteng AKUMASSA Program, in order to participate in the Jakarta Biennale 2013 – SIASAT (Tactic).
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