PHOTO REPRESENTATION OF BALINESE WOMEN IN “FACES OF INDONESIA: 500 POSTCARDS 1900—1945”

• Main Author: Putra Zuwandono, Rizki
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/75016
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

This study discusses the representation of women on the island of Bali in the book Faces of Indonesia: 500 Postcards 1900-1945 written by Scott Merrillees. All postcards in the book are the author's collection. Postcards in the book are classified based on six categories, Sumatra Island, Java Island, Bali and Lombok Islands, Kalimantan Island, Sulawesi Island, and Eastern Indonesia. The focus of this research is to examine the photographer's visualization of female subjects on the island of Bali, as well as the correlation between visual postcards and orientalism discourse. This study uses a descriptive research methodology. Balinese women's postcards are classified based on the visualization of the images and then analyzed using the method of art criticism Edmund Burke Feldman, photographic theory of Roland Barthes and Victor Burgin, and Edward Said's orientalism. The art criticism method is used to see the tendency of visualization of the subjects used by photographers during the Dutch East Indies colonial era, including the style and pose of the portrait. Photographic theory is used to see the correlation between orientalism discourse and visual postcard discourse published in that era. The research objects used in this study amounted to three objects. The postcards used as research samples were published by three publishers during the Dutch East Indies colonial government, Tio Tek Hong, KPM Shipping Line, and EFA. Based on the results of the analysis, it was found that the postcards of Balinese women were displayed in a vulgar manner to attract Europeans to visit the island of Bali. This is related to the image of exoticism attached to bare-chested Balinese women. Western imagination (the occident) is very strong in defining the Balinese (the orient) in the period 1900–1945.