Book Review | River in a Visual Shot by Frans Ari Prasetyo | 2017

The saying “picture speaks a thousand words” has become too much of a cliché to use in our current time where visual content bombards our senses on an hourly basis. Granted, this is because a large bulk of the visuals we encounter on social media do not even ‘speak a word.’ Frans Ari Prasetyo in his photo-centric book River in a Visual Shot gives a new meaning to that antiquated expression. Rather than “speaks a thousand words”, pictures in this book, “speak a thousand experiences”. Experiences of what? Of whom? It is the experiences of the men, women, and children, who live on the banks of the Citarum River—the third longest river in Java (300 km)!

One of the narratives of experiences singled out in this book is the impact of the erosion of the river on the population; here, I am specifically referring to the periodical flood that time and again hits the South of Bandung, the river basin where about five million people reside. Of course, the pollution of the river is also another dimension of experience the book addresses. If one Googles Citarum River, images evoking this acute state of pollution will appear, but of course, the situation is much more complicated than just what online media displays; and this is one of the strengths of Prasetyo’s book.

In this book, Prasetyo’s mission is to argue that visual media capturing the environment can open up discussions (often contentious) about the space and well-being of the population. One of the ways in which this aspect is narrated in the book is the adaptive scheme (skema adaptif) employed by the people of Bale Endah—a subdistrict of the Bandung regency—who have gone through countless experiences of the flood. Through this adaptive scheme, they adapt their housing circumstances to survive the flood, for instance by raising the floor of their house or constructing an additional level (sometimes 2-3 levels) onto their house’s roof; this is all done independently!

The images shown in the book convey this adaptive scheme as a survival mode very vividly. But rather than treating the subjects as victims, Prasetyo’s photography evokes the people’s resilience and perseverance to cope with the reality of living in a flood-prone areas like the Citarum River basin.

I can relate to the stories because as someone who grew up in the South of Bandung, precisely in the Pameungpeuk area, situated nearby Baleendah, my family encountered many experiences with flood. Factories producing textiles and shoes surround the area, so the river was often clogged up and polluted by the factories’ waste. When heavy rain falls, flood usually comes after.

So we too adopted the adaptive scheme mode of survival—raising the floor level of house and building another story—which didn’t help that much because the level of the flood rose each year substantially. The impact of the flood was tremendously felt, economically, logistically, and psychologically. So the story of the Baleendah folks is a recurring trope in the reality of the South Bandung communities.

I wonder whether it will be resolved in the future, but at the very least, Prasetyo’s book channels the frustration and the complexity of the matter. Yet, Prasetyo’s book also demonstrates that a visual medium like photography is potent, at the very least, to voice this often neglected issue of living in contemporary Bandung, but more importantly the voice of those who live in the peripheries of the city who are, one way or another, sidelined in the development of this so-called Paris of Java.

Ari Ernesto P
PhD candidate in Audiovisual Communication, University of Groningen, Netherland