Rony Zakaria and I spoke over a somewhat tenuous WhatsApp call, on an afternoon that seemed extended by the hour and a half time difference between Indonesia and India. His luminous photographs flitted across my screen as I listened to him speak, and slowly, the images seemed to fill my room, animated by small and large stories, of a history being formed. Something about these photographs lingered even as I moved from one body of work to the next through the course of our conversation, and a question began to slowly float up within it – why does history so desperately need images?

Like many photographers of his generation, Rony had not really intended to be a photographer, and was studying IT and mathematics when he first got interested in photojournalism. Soon, he began attending workshops at the Antara Gallery in Jakarta, and working on assignments as a freelance photojournalist. But after he took part in the Angkor Photo Workshop in 2007, his work began to take a markedly more personal approach. Around this time, Rony was turning the idea of a longer, more engaged project around in his mind, when he went to visit a friend living in Yogyakarta, in Java. Nestled between the sea and Mount Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, the landscape of the region has dictated a unique and often tenuous relationship between nature and the people who have made it their home. What began as a two week long trip for Rony, soon morphed into a decade long project titled Men, Mountains and the Sea, where he traveled across Indonesia, especially within Java island and Bali to experience and document this relationship.

The resulting photographs seem to be at the very edges of documentary, and very often tilt the viewer across it into a plane of myth, belief, desire and even fear. The philosophical idea of The Sublime, a quality that encompasses both terror and amazement often comes to mind when encountering this work, but it does not simply rest here, and decidedly moves away from an easy reading. Central to the work is the human experience, and the resilience, loss and triumph that it holds; seemingly timeless experiences despite the contemporaneity of the work.

This space between a more fundamental understanding of the human experience, and the actual, often violent trudge of history is a productive one that Rony has explored time and again as an artist. This is especially evident in his ongoing project Pantura, a document of numerous journeys Rony has undertaken along what is today called the Jalan Pantai Utara (colloquially shortened to Pantura), a major road constructed in the early 19th century by the Dutch, which connected five provinces across Java, and acted as a vital artery for trade, transportation and development, but which was built and maintained through painfully harsh means by the colonial administration. Although Rony’s own exploration does not directly address it, it is evident from his photographs that this history is etched deep into the very soul of the land, lives on through the people Rony encounters, and is unmistakably present through the very journey along the Pantura.

History itself has been a violent battleground in Indonesia through much of the 20th century. Cultural and religious identities, differing imaginations of nationhood and citizenship, opposing political ideologies and authoritarian regimes have all attempted to present singular histories of the peoples they claim to represent, both through state sanctioned projects including monuments and museums, and simultaneously through the violent erasure of noncorforming voices and ideas. The New Order period, lasting from 1967 to 1998 and characterized by the repressive dictatorial regime of president Suharto is an especially painful period in the nation’s history when systematic attempts were made to reorder its social and cultural imagination.

Rony’s latest project Hysteria Historia takes these official spaces of memorialisation from the period as sites akin to palimpsests, containing fragments of the very stories they had attempted to wipe away from public consciousness. Supported by the 2022 Arttaca Grant in Photography, the project emerged from Rony’s own experience of the Suharto regime as a child and adolescent, and his realization as an adult that the fall of the New Order did not necessarily mean an opening up of the country’s imagination. According to Rony, ‘For Indonesians, it has always been difficult to have a unified sense of nationhood, and therefore national history. For common people like me, our identities as parts of tribes or regions have always been more significant than strong patriotic fervor about the ‘nation’. When I was in high school, our curriculum was much concerned with battles, national heroes and martyrs, especially those who were glorified from the New Order period; yet as I have grown, I have forgotten much of what was drilled into us’.

For Rony, it is not the particulars of the history glorified in these museums that are of interest, but rather the ways truth and belief wind around each other in these sites. What one is taught to see, and what is actually on display are heavily determined by who is doing the looking, and for Rony, this experience has shifted significantly as he has grown up and returned to the museums he was once taken to as a child. His own experience as a photojournalist has been important in shaping his perception of truth and fiction, reality and myth, and in Hysteria Historia, he intentionally plays with blurring the distinctions between them. The history of Indonesia portrayed in its institutions is already a murky landscape, and Rony’s sepia toned photographs push against our desire for evidentiality in photography further. These pictures often leave us with a sense of confusion – is this a photograph of a real event or a diorama in a museum? Are these contemporary images of resistance and repression, or carefully constructed narratives designed to promote feelings of fear and fervor in its viewer?

By not providing any easy answers, Rony’s work prompts us to look more closely, urging us to stay in the discomfort of not knowing, a productive space where if we stay long enough, we begin to think for ourselves.

Rony Zakaria’s ongoing project Hysteria Historia is currently showing at RDX Offsite, Bangkok, as part of the Arttaca Group Exhibition, from October 1st to the 31st, 2022.