The Bowden-Thioune Family {Jakarta Sessions}
Photographs matter. Perhaps more than you’d think. At certain times, like, for example, the one we’re living through now, that value comes into high relief.
On my last trip to Jakarta, I made photographs for seven beautiful families. Mere days later, all but one of those families had left the country. Most thought they’d be gone a few weeks, and in many cases, those few weeks have turned into forever.
These images we created together become a time capsule of that period when the children were young, in a place where they were held by community, where they were nurtured and grew, learning the beginnings of how to be a human in this complicated world.
These stories, these places, are recorded now, and can be revisited in memory if not in material.
My own family left our home during that same time period; I came home to KL from Jakarta and then, four days later I was packing up everything I could fit into seven suitcases, and we’d left for Switzerland, probably never to return. We didn’t leave with family photos in KL. I always meant to, I’d even decided on the photographer I wanted to work with! But time, or budget or whatever it was kept me from prioritizing family photos, and now we don’t have that time and place set down in a book. I don’t have a record of that place big white flat, that place where we lived in the sky and watched our youngest grew from baby to little girl. I always thought I’d have more time. So, those memories, that place, will be held in our minds, not in our hands.
