Alongside our physical exhibitions, the Griffin hosts a series of online exhibitions in our Virtual Gallery and our Critic’s Pick Gallery. The beautiful quiet work of Anton Gautama, currently exhibited in our Virtual Gallery through July 17, is featured on our blog today. His series, Home Sweet Home, while focusing on his familiar surroundings, reminds us of our own. A series not only the objects, but also the people who inhabit our private and public spaces.
Home Sweet Home No.1 © Anton Gautama
I first became fascinated by the complexity of the home as I observed rows and rows of old Dutch colonial structures, while working on my first book, Pabean Passage. These old colonial structures showed a distinct East-Indies architecture, an adaptation of European architecture to the tropical climate of Indonesia, which gained its popularity in the mid 18th century.
Growing up in two major cities contributed a lot to this project. Born in Makassar, I also live in Surabaya for the most part of my life. What makes this project special is that I tried to capture those places from my experiences of growing up in the two cities.
Home Sweet Home No.4 © Anton Gautama
Built in the early 1900s by Chinese immigrants and based on a European design, these buildings show distinct East-Indies characteristics on the outside, while being infused with an assimilation of Chinese and Indonesian culture.
As I entered those houses, I felt the air of familiarity, a connection with the harmonious combination of two distinctive cultures that I was brought up under. Born as a third-generation Chinese-Indonesian, I was raised under the influence of the Chinese culture that my grandparents brought from the old world, while at the same time being schooled in a mainly Indonesian setting by my Indonesian-born parents.
Home Sweet Home No. 2 © Anton Gautama
Walking into those historic houses sparked my interest to discover more about the roots of my own cultural heritage. I felt my amazement turned into an aspiration to comprehend the lives of these Chinese- Indonesians, along with the challenges they faced to preserve their own culture while living in a whole new world. In Indonesia, there is this notion of family home, a place where history, culture, and tradition still live for generations. Just as the proverb says, “A house is built with boards and beams, a home is built with love and dreams,” these family homes have become a testimony of the evolution of Chinese-Indonesian cultures and traditions.
For many Chinese-Indonesians, their family home was (or still is) a place for business. Packed with merchandise, and various items collected over the years by the owners, these family homes silently tell their stories. They tell the stories about love and dreams, opportunities and challenges, laughter and tears of those who have called them home.
Home Sweet Home no. 9 © Anton Gautama
Home Sweet Home is a one-year journey into the evolution of the Chinese-Indonesian culture. It is the story of a harmonious marriage of two beautiful cultures, three centuries in-the-making. It was not a journey without obstacles, but it certainly was one with countless rewards. What began as a challenge to obtain the owners’ consent to photograph their homes has later proved to be a beginning of new friendships. The challenge to find the appropriate houses to shoot had presented me with the privilege of listening to countless stories that offer valuable lessons in life.
As I embarked on this journey, I have discovered that there is more to a home than what meets the eyes. Beyond the evidence of economical, functional, or sentimental hoarding. Beyond the cluttered halls or the neatly- organized storage rooms. Beyond the simplicity of aging and the glitters of luxury.
Home Sweet Home no. 10 © Anton Gautama
There is a story in each frame, hope and dreams embedded and encrypted beneath the layers of objects that fill the space. Walls displaying pictures of joyous achievements and traumatic miseries, the good-old days and the modern reality that stole their thunder.
A home is more than merely a dwelling place, it is a monument where stories are carved and histories are made. Whether it is an aging third-generation family home or a modern private home, there is this air of familiarity, a connection, a deep sense of longing. A pride in calling it a Home Sweet Home. -AG
About Anton Gautama
Anton Gautama began taking pictures with a mobile phone. Since 2015 he has been working professionally as photographer with a passionate focus on documentary photography. He believes that the essence of the medium is the ability to help us understand life. Gautama seeks unique moments that generate powerful emotional responses. With patience and determination, the photographer often immerses himself for months at a single location pursuing his photographic observations.
Home Sweet Home no. 6
© Anton Gautama
The photographs from Anton Gautama have been featured in several online and printed magazine platforms since 2016, such as “LensCulture” and “National Geographic Travel.” His works have been exhibited solo at the Goethe Institute – Jakarta, Indonesian Institute of Art – Jogjakarta. Gautama’s photographs have received numerous international awards, including in international photo festivals. His first monograph Pabean Passage, published in 2016, reveals the milieu of traditional Indonesian spice markets through intimate colour street photography.
In October 2015 Anton Gautama opened a private photo gallery in Malang in order to share his passion of photography. In keeping with his interest in exploring and preserving Indonesian culture, he also restored a full set of Javanese gamelan and placed it inside the gallery.
Born as a fourth son in 1969 in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, Anton Gautama is based in Surabaya, Master in Business Administration from Hawaii Pacific University, USA, and is also the founder of ALFALINK, a prominent overseas education consultancy with branches throughout Indonesia.
Essay by Celina Lunsford Artistic
Director of Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
I first started using X-rays as a tool to visually explore objects in 2010 when I took a box full of my daughters’ dolls to work. The X-rays were ghost-like and haunting, and I liked them. I could literally see beneath the surface (as the photography cliché goes). The source of X-rays is a linear accelerator– the same machine that is used to treat cancer patients. But treating dolls with cancer killing rays was not the end goal, of course. I continued making X-rays with other objects from diverse sources such as nature (birds, seed pods, skulls), flea markets (vacuum tubes and light meters), and musical instruments.. Five years ago, I started X-raying cameras Actually, I X-ray anything that seems interesting to me and fits on a few pieces of film or the digital imager. I have a small collection of thirty cameras that I started X-raying in 2015. I made a few prints and showed them to my photography friends. Many of them let me borrow their cameras to X-ray. After three years I had made x-rays of 130 cameras. The idea of the book came from a portfolio review of the camera X-rays by Jennifer Yoffy in Atlanta. It was published in December 2018 by Fraction Editions and 500 copies were printed.
This work uses x-rays to explore the micro-evolution of cameras and is a metaphor about the limits of evolution. While form and media may have changed, the camera is still a camera: a tool to create images by capturing photons of light. Today’s sophisticated digital cameras look and operate far differently than the first cameras of the nineteenth century, however the essentials have not changed. The photographer points a contraption with a lens towards the subject to encode its likeness on a storage medium, be it film or digital sensor. And this contraption has been manufactured in many wonderful and clever designs, the complexity usually hidden inside. While making these x-rays, I have been surprised and astonished by what I found inside the cameras. The lens, when imaged from the side, contain a multi-element train of perfectly shaped glass forms whose purpose is to collect and direct light towards the target.
The idea was formed when I started a series called Treasures: 44 objects, about all the things I’ve known for my whole life that live at my mothers house. The end product was a 6 x 8 x 3.5 inch wood box which included all 44 objects on 5 x 7 inch cards, Edition of 3. I decided to start putting all my fine art in book form for my family or anyone to easily enjoy. Treasures: objects I’ve known all my life, was perfect to start with, as I felt like it was already a book, and all the images were ready to go.
Treasures is a short story if you read the back of each card. Each card tells a bit about the life of the object. The images might trigger your emotions about objects you may have grown up with, so I want you to feel a connection to an object and have your own memory.
Treasures is a humorous look at the objects people live with, that we build our lives around, that we give breath to, and how they eventually become part of our lives – and tell our stories.
Artist Statement: Caught In The Looking Glass is a handmade artist’s book that celebrates random reflections that appear on a shiny surface. Twelve color images illustrate that, indeed, another world can exist within the frame of a mirror. This lay-flat book contains twelve images that were captured in or around a chateau in the South of France. Inside covers are lined with mirrored paper; the book is enclosed by a soft, paper slip case.
Artist Statement: As a diehard New Yorker, I have often admired the flowers one may find in her neighborhood bodega. Bodegas are unique and ubiquitous to the various neighborhoods in New York City; of course, pending gentrification. Their locations span from the Bronx to the Lower Eastside and Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn. They are reliable 24 hour stores where one can purchase a beverage, lottery tickets, smokes or a sandwich. Many are also places where you could buy a colorful bouquet of flowers in a pinch. Wrapped in cellophane, these bouquets are specifically identified as ‘Bodega Flowers’. Some may view these flowers as ‘cheap or less than’ but that’s simply not the case. Roses come in every color, Daisies are pretty, and fluorescent Pom Poms are for the taking. Bodega Flowers are for everyone and they are truly beautiful!
The idea for this project came when I found out that the new art teacher in my son’s grade school was teaching the class to color within the lines. I knew that if I confronted her in an argument that she had a bad idea, I would loose the argument. So I choose to undermine her teaching by having my son create photograms in our bedroom – bathroom. I began that series in 1984 with each of my kids taking turns posing and then we developed the photograms in the bathroom. I came back to photograms fifteen years later, in 1999 with professional models. A second time I came back to the photograms with professional models around 2015. This when I came up with the idea of creating a book with these three sets of images.
