Contemporary photography with an ancient taste with I Gusti Agung Wijaya Utama

The first photographs of Bali were taken by foreigners and began to circulate in Europe starting from 1920. But it was around the 1930s that an imagination began to take shape around the island of the gods, an exotic place whose images featured women bare breasts, dancers or witches, nothing to do with local culture, up to the definition of tropical paradise. It is precisely on these partial shortcomings of the traditional representation of the past that the project of the Balinese photographer I Gusti Agung Wijaya Utama S. Sn (alias Gung Ama), specialized in photography at the Indonesian Art Institute (ISI) in Denpasar, begins. The photographer began using the Afghan Box Camera to make not only his portraits unique but also their creation process. The camera is in fact also an autonomous darkroom. Inside the box, mounted on a tripod, he develops a paper negative of the image just taken in a small tray filled with chemical solution, producing black and white photographs in just a few minutes, without film. The result is - unlike digital products - unpredictable thanks also to the role that light has in the final image. The subjects photographed by I Gusti are dressed in traditional clothing and placed in timeless scenarios, outdoors or in the photographer's studio, all for an atmosphere with the flavor of a past to remember and respect.