Reassembled from Rubble: Impressions from Temple Hopping in Indonesia

I’ve been confused about the genre of the photo essay for some time, unable to figure out if it is:

1. A collection of photos with no prose
2. A collection of photos with prose about the photos
3. A collection of photos with prose adjacent to but independent of the photos

The third is the style that I default to when adding captions on Instagram, which perhaps foolishly, I treat as a vehicle for writing just as much as photography.

Something that I think much about in both photography and writing, and indeed the arts and life in general, is composition. Things are composed of other things. A sentence is a journey composed of words, a paragraph a journey composed of sentences, and an essay a journey composed of paragraphs.

It’s occasioned me to wonder if documentation from recent travels in Indonesia and the stray thoughts they’ve induced compose into something coherent.

Below are five posts from that trip, each a carousel (a sequence of photos under a single caption) transferred over with minimal rewrites. The only major formal choice was in deciding which carousels and captions to choose and in what order to arrange them. Is it a photo essay? Is it a poem composed of paragraphs instead of stanzas?

I don’t know, but here goes.

Nirvana

Imagine the Bible. But with pictures instead of words, stone instead of paper, a building instead of a book, and Buddhism instead of Christianity. That is Borobudur Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in the world.

Because it is a pyramidal skin covering a hill, it requires no mortar or beams to hold its stones together. As you circle and ascend this stone-covered hilltop, you are greeted with reliefs illustrating a pilgrim’s search for wisdom. They invite you to meditate, reflect, and search yourself during your own pilgrimage towards the summit, where you will find no more walls or carvings. The summit is supposed to represent the emptiness from all things that obscure clarity, otherwise known as Nirvana.

I did not achieve Nirvana.

Maintenance

The stones at Borobudur are made of a volcanic rock called Andesite, named after the volcanic Andes mountains. Andesite is highly erosion resistant. I am glad for it.

Facts

An impressionistic assortment of facts:

• The Dutch pronounce the letter “J” with a “Y” sound.
• Dutch colonizers and other Europeans plundered Borobudur, chiseling and sawing off Buddha heads from more than half of the 500 statues there.
• Dutch archeologists then painted the dark, unreflective walls of the temple a yellow ochre in order to photograph and document the reliefs carved into them. This paint has permanently stained the walls.
• Borobudur tour guides are very fond of pointing these things out.
• Borobudur is located next to the city of Yogyakarta. It was originally spelled Jogjakarta, but pronounced with the “Y” sound. Non-Dutch people did not know this, so pronounced it with a hard “J” sound.
• When naively sounding out “Yogyakarta” at the airport, somebody corrected me that it is pronounced “Jogjakarta.”
• “Y’s are pronounced with a hard J sound,” they said.
• They were neither Dutch nor Indonesian.

Rubble

The Hindu Prambanan Temple is a 90-minute drive from Borobudur. Despite all the expense and toil it took to construct, it was abandoned less than a century after it was completed. Historians think a volcanic eruption blanketed it with ash and triggered a mass migration that left Prambanan to the mercy of the jungle. When it was rediscovered in the 1800s, the temples had collapsed into piles of stone.

They’ve since been painstakingly reconstructed, but with a catch: Indonesian archaeological rules inherited from Dutch colonizers dictate that a structure may only be reconstructed if more than 75% of the original masonry can be found.

This is why the central shrines stand tall while, tragically or photogenically, surrounded by the rubble of smaller irrecoverable ones.

Islands

At Prambanan Temple Park, 9th century Hindu and Buddhist temples stand side by side. The Buddhist Sewu Temple is only a 15-minute walk from Prambanan Temple. You can tell the two apart by their silhouettes. Prambanan looks fractal in its spikiness, sort of like a flame. Sewu is composed of stupas that look like little bells a deity could pick up and ring.

It is a marvel that two major religions in such close proximity could coexist in harmony so long ago. And a marvel still that a predominantly Muslim country preserves these Buddhist and Hindu monuments with diligence.

Not pictured: the independent, overlapping calls to prayer echoing from nearby mosques and their loudspeakers: a cacophonous yet coherent soundtrack for the setting sun as it casts millennia-old silhouettes.

It brings to mind Indonesia’s national motto: “Unity in diversity.”

Fitting for a nation of 17,000 islands.

That’s all folks!

Thank you for indulging me this little experiment. As to whether it resonated, I’d love to hear from you here or on Instagram (@asymmetricmeter) where I indulge in even more stray photos and stray thoughts.

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