Anthropological Quarterly

Reckoned in terms of its broadest ambitions and reach, Karen Strassler's Demanding Images is a welcome and absorbing ethnographic study of "the protean and unpredictable nature of political communication in an age of neoliberalism, democracy, and complexly mediated public spheres" (24). The uncertainties of Indonesia's post-authoritarian politics are the focus of the book, framed by the collapse of the Suharto regime in May 1998 and the election of Joko Widodo ("Jokowi") as the country's seventh president in July 2014. This 16-year period witnessed: a studentled reform movement (Reformasi); increasingly pluralistic and participatory democracy, accompanied by decentralization and electoral reforms; growing press freedoms; public demand for transparency and accountability; persistent corruption and scandal; further saturation of society by neoliberal ideologies and economic schemes; a proliferation of new visual and media technologies; and oligarchic control or ownership of media by political elites and corporate figures. This framing begins on an auspicious note—the collapse of an authoritarian regime joined with the exuberant hopes of Reformasi. It ends on one as well—the electoral triumph of the populist, democratic reformer Jokowi. Life isn't all sunshine, however. Strassler is acutely aware of the "lingering afterlife of authoritarian ideologies and practices" (19) that left Indonesians in a state of anxiety and unease throughout the period. Progressive activists have been key to the energies of reformist moments; so, too, have they been watchful for ghosts from the authoritarian past. It is no surprise then that activists hold [End Page 759] a prominent place in Strassler's look at media ecologies and the public circulation of images.

Strassler links her interest in the ambiguities of political communication to Benedict Anderson's (1978) call for the study of visual forms and their open-ended, shifting political meanings. She has come up with a simple and brilliant approach. Her conceptual and ethnographic sensibilities alight on what she calls "image-events" in order to capture "the shifting, emergent, and contested processes by which political imaginations and subjectivities take form" (25). She sees the image-event as "a political process set in motion when a specific image or set of images erupts onto and intervenes in a social field, becoming a focal point of discursive and affective engagement across diverse publics" (9–10). Indonesian politics, for Strassler, "has become a politics of turbulent image-events" (11), owing in no small part to the volatility of images, their paranoid reception, and prevailing or competing ideologies of transparency. The tension between "ludic" and "evidentiary" modes of image-making, circulation, and reception comes in for nimble and nuanced scrutiny. So too do processes of "remediation" in which images are refashioned (and potentially re-purposed) within and across media. Strassler, the author of the prize-winning Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (2010), is exceptionally deft in revealing the ambiguities and ironies of images (especially photographic images) as they go through remediation, circulation, and debate. In several respects, Demanding Images reprises the concerns of Refracted Visions, especially with regard to how imagemaking and other visual practices give rise to political subjects and communities. Both are agenda-setting contributions to Indonesian studies and the anthropology of visual culture.

Demanding Images comprises a series of episodes in Indonesian political communication. Each episode (or set of episodes) receives a rich and extensive chapter-length treatment, drawn in particular from materials circulating in print as well as televised press, websites, blogs, and social media. The first two date back to the time of Strassler's doctoral fieldwork in Yogyakarta (1998–2000). Chapter 1 ("Face Value") examines the ludic reworking and circulation of the Indonesian 50,000 rupiah note—which featured Suharto's face—within and beyond networks of Reformasi activists throughout late 1998 and 1999. The image-events picked up steam with an installation by Yogyakarta artist Yuswantoro Adi called Anybody Can Be President, which displayed a large painting of the bill with a hole [End Page 760] that allowed anyone to place...