Bandung Street Documentary #1: Mother and Child

I have quite a number of posts in this blog which qualify for street photography. Those of you who followed Bandung Daily Photo regularly may well remember my posts about street vendors, umbrella taxi kids, street musicians, etc. All of these posts were meant to give you a more complete picture of Bandung, not only as a city or a place on the map, but also as a living community of people whose struggles, emotions, and way of living are as important as, if not more important than, the place itself. I intend to make Bandung Daily Photo a unique and authoritative visual (photography) reference about Bandung and its people.

As part of that commitment, and to fulfill the claim that this particular Bandung Daily Photo is a visual journal of Bandung and its vicinities, today I begin this new series which I call Bandung Street Documentary. This series is in addition to the already existing City of People series which I began earlier.

Bandung Daily Photo will continue posting photographs and stories about other things that are informative and worth publishing and sharing with the world in the hope that more and more readers will know Bandung better. As an Indonesian proverb says, "tak kenal maka tak sayang" (those who don't know, don't love), I hope my photographs and stories here will bring more understanding, and therefore love, to this city.

As the name indicates, the emphasis of Bandung Street Documentary series is on the documentary value of the photographs and the place in which the photographs are taken, i.e. the streets.

A bit of background about documentary photography

What is documentary photography?
According to several authoritative sources I can get, documentary photography is a type of photojournalism of which the objectives are to produce truthful (objective) and candid visual representation of a particular subject, especially those of people, through the perspective of the photographer.

Documentary photography, according to the art critic Elizabeth McCausland, "has no room for exhibitionism or opportunism or exploitation in the equipment of the documentary photographer. His purpose must be clear and unified, and his mood simple and modest. Montage of his personality over his subject will only defeat the serious aims of documentary photography."

Pursuant to the above definitions of documentary photography, therefore, this series will not emphasize on the photo forms but on the photo's documentary value and content.