Seno [Gumira Adjidarma] once indicated that Jakarta consists of many conceptions and perceptions of space that go beyond the materiality of the built environment. The city is formed by many dimensional layers, but since they are not relationally organized, the order of things is not only messy but also absurd. -Abidin Kusno
Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia and the second most populated metropolitan area in the world. Not much else is known about this megacity in the United States. As a place where traffic jams set the pace of daily life and the gap between the high-rise megaplexes and the street life of the kampungs provides a reminder of the unequal progress of postcolonial urbanism, Jakarta is a city whose complexity and ‘messiness’ inspires dreams for development and the future metropolis. Always on the move and hard to decode, Jakarta offers daily and unexpected encounters and challenges to citizens and visitors alike.
The exhibition Jakarta: A Mirror of a Thousand Reflections--a collaboration between John Zarobell’s urban research and Pedro Lange-Churión’s photographs-- follows Comparative Urbanism: Learning from Jakarta, the conference convened in August 2024 at the SPUR Urban Center in San Francisco, with scholars from Jakarta and the Bay Area. The exhibition engages the layered dimensions of a city that transforms itself daily. Not seeking to exoticize—, neither the city, nor its challenges as it adapts to globalization or climate change—, the exhibit works carefully to bear witness to the life and physical structure of the city in order to invite reflection on the many dimensions that make up Jakarta and the many ways its fate and struggles mirror those of all cities.
Photography’s precision in recording reality presents a challenge: how to convey not only what the camera captures, but how the artist sees. The gaze in these images reflects a sense of wonder at Jakarta’s kaleidoscopic urban fabric. Rather than offering a dry documentation of the Indonesian megacity, these photographs—shot on both film and digital, using medium and large formats—seek a layered visual narrative.
Darkroom prints were created on carefully chosen papers to evoke the tones and textures of Atget, Abbott, and Talbot. This deliberate aesthetic contrasts with the immediacy of the urban subject matter, inviting distance and reflection, disrupting exoticized views and commonplace assumptions often projected onto images from the Global South. Likewise, the color photographs—digital and analog—are shaped through framing and print choice to honor Jakarta’s complexity with beauty and dignity.
Pedro Lange-Chúrion is a photographer, filmmaker and professor at the University of San Francisco. His most recent museum exhibition, Duerma en ti, was featured at the Museo Nacional Anthropologia (Madrid, 2022) and other venues throughout Spain. He has directed various films and collaborated in video installations on urban themes, in addition to publishing regularly on world cinema and Latin American and world literatures.
John Zarobell is a professor of Global Studies at the University of San Francisco and the author of two books: Art and the Global Economy (2017) and Empire of Landscape (2010). A former museum curator (SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art), he has been researching Asian Megacities since 2016 and has taught two travel classes in Jakarta with colleagues from the Urban Planning department of Universitas Tarumanagara.
