Contemporary Authors

• Photography and Egypt Reaktion Books (London, England), 2010
• Meteorite: Nature and Culture Reaktion Books (London, England), 2015

1. Meteorite https://lccn.loc.gov/2016417226 Golia, Maria, author. Meteorite / Maria Golia. London : Reaktion Books, 2015.©2015 208 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), portraits ; 21 cm. QB755 .G645 2015 ISBN: 9781780234977 (paperback)178023497X (paperback) 2. Photography and Egypt https://lccn.loc.gov/2010444640 Golia, Maria. Photography and Egypt / Maria Golia. London : Reaktion, 2010. 191 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 22 cm. TR117 .G65 2010 ISBN: 9781861895431 (pbk.)1861895437 (pbk.)

• Cairo: City of Sand - 2004 Raction Books, https://www.amazon.com/Cairo-City-Topographics-Maria-Golia/dp/1861891873

• Maria Golia - https://mariagolia.wordpress.com/about/

  About
  It seems I am the only American lady living in and writing about Egypt for the last couple of decades. If there were others I would have run into them by now. My non-fiction books, Photography and Egypt (Reaktion Books, 2010) and Cairo City of Sand (Reaktion Books, 2004) involved extensive historical research alongside an intimate understanding of the country’s present moment, its place in today’s world as much as in that of the past.

  In the last few years, writing about Egypt has become rather fraught and frankly repetitive. The political side of the story may be summed up as follows: power seeks to preserve itself and Egypt’s seemingly inflexible authoritarian regime has so far managed to bend with the winds of the Arab Spring without breaking. In terms of Egypt’s fragile desert environment, a topic of many of my articles over time, the main advances that have been made are towards greater destruction. To achieve some intellectual distance, I turned to outer space. Meteorite, a cultural history of space rocks will appear in Fall, published by Reaktion in their ‘Earth’ series.

  I first became interested in meteorites thanks to a 1999 talk given by Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center at an Institute of Ecotechnics conference in Aix en-Provence. Dr. McKay noted that since it had been proved that some meteorites on Earth came from Mars, the opposite was probable, that bits of Earth have reached other planets. A growing body of evidence suggests that some meteorites carry chemical compounds or types of bacteria that could survive impacts, so that the building blocks of life as we know it may have been delivered from afar or conversely, Earth may have sent the seeds of life into space.

  As a fellow of the Institute of Ecotechnics, I attended many of these conferences uniting scientists, artists and thinkers around themes in the cognitive and planetary sciences and highlighting advances in varied technologies. Founded in 1973 by a group of like-minded individuals who met in the heyday of Haight Ashbury, the Institute’s goal was to develop a discipline to harmonize ecology and technology, forces increasingly at odds. Their grandest effort was Biosphere 2, built in Oracle Arizona in the 1980s, a miniature Earth enclosed in glass (the size of two football fields) replete with 3800 species of life, everything from pigs to hummingbirds. Eight people lived inside for two years, partaking in a unique experiment whose scale, daring and hard data have only now begun to be properly assessed. The purpose was to observe how humans interact with each other and their environment under specific limitations, how much air, soil and water they needed to thrive, while envisaging how, if humanity is to travel into distant space, it might best manage the long journey.

  The project launch was held in the old Motorola research center in Oracle in 1985. It was the glasnost era, and among those participating in the endeavor aside from luminaries of the Royal Society, NASA and the Smithsonian, were the valiant Russian scientists who first experimented with closed systems, contributed to building the Mir space station and sent plants and small animals up with the cosmonauts, dreaming of an interplanetary future for Earth’s life forms. In the captivating atmosphere of that large timbered conference room, I apperceived the value of humanity’s epic quest for knowledge. That value was restored to me while perusing the extraordinarily wide-ranging research concerning meteorites and I hope the book will communicate some of the sense of amazement I experienced while writing it.

  In addition to many years as columnist and commentator for Cairo, Beirut and London publications, I’ve worked for Vogue (New York), The International Herald Tribune and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich). I’m currently correspondent for The Middle East (UK) and Middle-East reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement (London). Links to my ‘author’s pages’ are on the ‘non-fiction’ page of this site.

  Aside from Egypt and space (urban, inner and outer) I’m a jazz aficionado and had the honor of managing one of America’s most splendid music venues and performing arts centers, the Caravan of Dreams, in Fort Worth Texas (1988-1992). The Caravan was another seminal project realized by the Institute of Ecotechnics, with Kathelin Hoffman Gray as artistic director. I hope to write about the adventure of bringing avant-garde arts and music to the heart of conservative America one of these fine days.

• Middle East Institute - http://www.mei.edu/profile/maria-golia

  Maria Golia, an American writer, has lived in downtown Cairo for over two decades. She is the author of Cairo, City of Sand and Photography and Egypt (Reaktion Books, UK, 2004, 2010), non-fiction works involving extensive historical research alongside an intimate understanding of the country’s present moment. Long-time columnist for the Lebanon Daily Star and the New Internationalist (Oxford), she contributes political and social commentary to a variety of publications. Her work aims to illustrate both the contrasts between Egyptian and other societies and the motivations that seem to drive us all.

Golia, Maria. Cairo: City of Sand
Ravi Shenoy
Library Journal.
129.13 (Aug. 2004): p105.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
GOLIA, MARIA. Cairo City of Sand. Reaktion, dist. by Consortium. (Topographics). Aug. 2004. 232p. photogs. bibliog. ISBN 1-86189-187-3
pap. $27. TRAV
Golia, a long-term resident of Cairo, exhibits a strong and broad knowledge of her city's vibrant character. In five scholarly essays, she covers a
range of topics, from the city's history and its urban space to the complex interactions between Cairenes and foreigners and "the roles of family,
tradition and bureaucracy in everyday life." With an extensive notes section and select bibliography, this is not a travel guidebook but a
sociological and cultural account that will deepen the visitor's understanding of this dynamic city. A good supplement to the conventional travel
guide--provided the general reader can get past the somewhat forbidding writing style; recommended for academic and large public libraries.--
Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL
Shenoy, Ravi
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shenoy, Ravi. "Golia, Maria. Cairo: City of Sand." Library Journal, Aug. 2004, p. 105+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA121503667&it=r&asid=8394e6b0ea589db09b1e83f390edca17. Accessed 4 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A121503667

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1 Photography and Egypt
Fred Rhodes
The Middle East.
.409 (Mar. 2010): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2010 IC Publications Ltd.
http://www.icpublications.com/
Full Text: 
1 PHOTOGRAPHY AND EGYPT
BY MARIA GOLIA
PUBLISHED BY REAKTION BOOKS
ISBN 9781861895431
PRICE 15.95 [pounds sterling] PAPERBACK
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Egypt immediately conjures images of the pyramids, the temples and the Sphinx in the desert. Early photographs of Egypt took these ancient
monuments as their primary subjects, and these have remained hugely influential in constructing our view of the country. But while the
photography of Egypt and its monuments by foreigners has been well documented, until now comparatively little has been known about the early
days of photography among Egyptians themselves. Photography and Egypt presents a wide range of photography made by Egyptians, of
Egyptians, from the mid-19th century to the present day. Golia examines how photography was employed for propaganda purposes, including
depictions of celebrated soldiers, workers and farmers; and how studio-based photography was used to portray the growing Egyptian middle
class. The author reveals how today's young photographic artists use the medium to celebrate everyday life and to indict political and social
conditions, with photography bearing witness to history as well as helping to shape it.
Rhodes, Fred
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rhodes, Fred. "1 Photography and Egypt." The Middle East, Mar. 2010, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA221849300&it=r&asid=156bf3ef411c178521da9cd49427e773. Accessed 4 Mar.
2017.
3/4/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A221849300

Art Bulletin.
By: BATCHEN, GEOFFREY. Art Bulletin. Dec2011, Vol. 93 Issue 4, p497-501. 5p.
Photography and Egypt MARIA GOLIA London: Reaktion Books, 2010. 194 pp.; 77 color ills., 44 b/w. $29.95 Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java KAREN STRASSLER Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. 400 pp.; 32 color ills., 95 b/w. $24.95
The appearance of books about the photography produced in Egypt and Indonesia -- following the recent publication of histories of the photography of Japan, Denmark, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Great Britain, Australia, India, China, Italy, and the United States, to name only a few -- suggests that the history of photography is in the process of being transformed beyond recognition.[1] Certainly the parameters of this field are now, at last, being stretched to include the entire globe (or so it seems). Soon, very soon, it will be impossible to know the history of photography in its entirety, in the sense that the generation brought up on Beaumont Newhall imagined it was knowable -- the history that could be told in a thousand canonical pictures.[2] The question is whether the nature of the field itself -- its ambitions, methods of analysis, narrative structures, and objects of interest -- is also undergoing radical change. An examination of these two new books invites a meditation on precisely this issue.
If nothing else, the recent wave of national histories of photography might well be regarded as a discursive sign of the tectonic shifts occurring in the world at large. In our post-Cold War era, it seems that no nation-state can any longer be truly self-respecting until it has its own history of photography. This is surely a strange and contradictory phenomenon: at the very moment when global capitalism, mass migrations, modern transportation systems, and electronic communications have combined to make a nation-state's boundaries entirely permeable, these histories are tenaciously reiterating the notion that a national essence can be identified and described. In this context we can understand such narratives as operating in two, perhaps complementary, ways -- as nostalgic for a wholeness that never was and/or as strategically resistant to the threat of global homogenization.
That threat is real enough. National histories of photography inevitably measure themselves against the perceived inadequacies of the existing "world" surveys of the medium. Written by American, German, or French scholars, these survey texts have never bothered to address themselves with any rigor to photographic practices outside the world's centers. The best of them -- the 1994 volume edited by Michel Frizot, which appeared in English translation in 1998 as A New History of Photography -- does not reproduce any images by African photographers, let alone Indonesian or Egyptian ones.[3] But it is not just the narrow coverage offered by this kind of survey that is now at issue; it is the imperialism reproduced in the historical method of the global survey that is up for debate, the presumption that photography is an international (meaning Euro-American) product, more or less the same wherever it is found, rather than a differentiated field of practices in which both form and meaning can be disconcertingly local. The opening challenge for national histories of photography is therefore to furnish evidence for this localism.
It is certainly not the only challenge they face. As the first accounts in English of the medium's impact on Egypt and Indonesia, the two books under review must provide a situated history of the photography of each country without ignoring the rhyzomatic flow of bodies, images, and ideas that constitutes the modernity within which this history has occurred. In addition, they must overcome the usual art historical prejudice that regards the art of the provinces as little more than a belated, secondhand version of what has already happened in the metropolitan centers. In the words of Joel Smith: "Just as conventions of format make even a remarkable family's photo album look much like the Jones's next door, the nation-based history tends to tell a generic narrative with strangely familiar landmarks."[4] The task, again, is to persuade readers from the metropolis that photographs that look the same to them -- that appear to be mere copies of genres already familiar in the West -- may perhaps mean different things, might actually be different objects, in other places.
It is striking that neither of the authors of these two books -- Maria Golia and Karen Strassler -- is trained in art history or the history of photography. Golia is an American-born writer of fiction and nonfiction who has lived in Cairo for twenty years, having published a history of that city in 2004.[5] Strassler, also an American, is an assistant professor of anthropology at Queens College, the City University of New York. Each speaks the language of the culture she is discussing and has spent time living in that culture. They are positioned, therefore, as both outsiders and native informants. This conflicted identity is embodied in each book by the decision to write in the first person, turning their illustrated historical commentaries into the equivalent of subjective documentaries. It is an approach that further distinguishes these books from the world surveys.
Photography and Egypt comes to us as part of an ongoing series overseen by British historians Mark Haworth-Booth and Peter Hamilton and published in the United Kingdom by Reaktion Books. Very broadly conceived, the Exposures series already includes Photography and Australia, Photography and Spirit, Photography and Cinema, Photography and Literature, Photography and Science, Photography and Flight, Photography and Africa, Photography and Italy, and Photography and the U.S.A.[6] Copiously illustrated in color and written in an accessible style (albeit with endnotes), the series amounts to a multiau-thored, multivolume history of photography, with no end in sight. A series that can be assigned as a whole or in parts, it is likely to serve as the new standard "textbook" for the field.
A lot could be made to hang on the "and" that splits each title in the series. It offers an opportunity for the nation-based books, for example, to investigate that nation as a photographic theme or idea rather than as a state with fixed boundaries. In that spirit, Golia begins her book with an acknowledgment of the many European photographers who worked in Egypt in the 1850s, such as Felix Teynard and Francis Frith. Subsequent chapters, which are arranged more or less chronologically, focus almost entirely on indigenous Egyptian photographers, tracing the work of important portrait studios, photojournalists, and artists. However, in her final chapter she also discusses (without illustrating) Nan Goldin's photographs from 2003 of her Egyptian lover Jabalowe, suggesting that "Egypt's sensual geographies lurk in the bend of Jaba-lowe's knee and the hollow of his back." As Golia observes, "he not only embodies Egypt: for Goldin, he probably was Egypt" (p. 156). It is to Golia's credit that she takes the trouble to trace how this sort of "Egyp-tianicity" has been propagated in photographic form, such that Goldin's images could indeed carry such a powerful connotation, for her and probably for us as well.[7]
Photography and Egypt presents this connotation as a paradox, summing it up in a story about the transfer of an ancient statue of Ramses II from downtown Cairo to a location behind the Giza pyramids: "Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians lined the streets to watch the pharaoh's stately progress, the glowing LCD screens of their mobile phones held aloft in homage to this symbol of greatness and decline, beauty and tyranny, on its long and weary way out of town" (p. 162). Not long ago, this sentence could as plausibly have been written about Egypt's most recent pharaonic figure, President Hosni Mubarak. His overthrow in 2011, an outcome in part generated by the extensive use of so-called social media such as Facebook and Twitter, makes Golia's book a very timely one. Indeed, in her history, Egyptian photography is inextricable from its political context. As she tells us, by the turn of the twentieth century, photographically illustrated publications were employed by Egyptian nationalists to oppose both the monarchy and the country's British occupiers. Members of the Egyptian royal family, in turn, collected photographs and frequently had themselves photographed, sometimes to promote the opening of public works but more often just to broadcast their glamour and celebrity. King Farouk, in particular, engineered a flattering public image for himself as someone simultaneously fun-loving and pious, an image reiterated in the circulation of photographs of his coronation, wedding, and first child. The arrival of World War II saw Farouk grow stout and less photogenic, and his popularity plummeted accordingly.
Farouk's abdication in 1952 was followed by the rule of three autocratic presidents drawn from the military establishment, with each commandeering all public photography for the service of the state and therefore of himself. According to Golia, photographs of the first of these autocrats, Gamal Abdel Nasser, are marked by something she calls "physicality" (p. 118). "Often photographed from behind, with his broad shoulders facing an ecstatic crowd," she explains, "his face was so well-known it didn't have to be in the picture." The efforts of his successor, Anwar Sadat, to reproduce Nasser's nonchalance before the camera were less successful. A series of color pictures presenting "a day in the life of the president," photographed by Farouk Ibrahim in 1975, showed Sadat shaving in his underwear, among other poses. The result, says Golia, "conveyed less intimacy than exhibitionism" (p. 128). In any case, images of Sadat as national icon were at odds with the poverty and corruption experienced by average Egyptians. His assassination in 1981 (killed, along with eleven others, by mutinous soldiers during a parade) saw him replaced by Mubarak, who immediately imposed an emergency law that he never lifted, "its degenerative effects on society accumulating insidiously to this day" (p. 132). Among these effects was a lack of public questioning of the state; "this censorship by omission amounted to a complicity for which Egyptians have yet to forgive the press" (p. 132). Not for the first time Golia finds herself speaking for all Egyptians, as if a homogeneous, national voice is indeed possible. Presciently, her chapter on this aspect of Egyptian photography finishes with the population's increased access to the Internet and mobile-phone cameras, and with it a circumvention of the power of state censorship. The rest, as they say, is history.
A poignant epilogue reflects on the difficulty of writing such a history for Egyptian photography, given the paucity of archives or museums devoted to its preservation. Go-lia traces various failed or partial attempts to establish such archives, with the Arab Image Foundation based in Beirut proving to be the most substantial effort so far. It is a reminder of the centrality to Golia's account of her conversations with photographers and their families, the primary source for much of the information she passes on about the operations of professional studios in Egypt. She is able to tell us, as a result, that Sadat appreciated photographers who were able to lighten the color of his skin in their pictures. But she also provides mini-biographies for several fascinating Armenian immigrants who ran important studios in Cairo, such as Armand, Ahmed Moussa, Garo, Van Leo, and Alban. According to Golia, "taken together, the work of the studio photographers presents a luminous face of Egypt, or at least of its cities -- urbane, provocative, game -- a cultural hybrid that defies categorization" (p. 95). It is certainly hard to know in what category one should place the many hand-colored photographs made by Ahmed Moussa of his young daughter Laila. She apparently "adopted a variety of guises for her father's camera: the scrubbed-face girl in braids cuddling a puppy, the pensive student poring over books, dressed as a geisha girl, as Venus, as Faust's Gretchen, and in seductive Bedouin garb" (p. 89). Suffice it to say that another daughter from a second marriage destroyed many of the prints and negatives after her father's death.
Refracted Visions also relies heavily on anecdotal evidence, but it is a far more substantial academic study (in both length and ambition) than Photography and Egypt. The book focuses on one particular theme: the relation of vernacular photographic practices to the development of a modern Indonesian state. This allows it to abandon the strictures of both chronology and the survey and to instead investigate six key genres in some depth: amateur photography, studio portraiture, identity photographs, family ritual photography, student photographs of demonstrations, and photographs of charismatic public figures. Working, like Golia, without easy access to public archives, Strassler based her findings on her field-work in Yogyakarta, a provincial capital in central Java where she lived between November 1998 and May 2000, drawing on personal relationships and private collections as well as her own keen observations of Indonesian life. This sense of presence is central to her account, reiterated as much in the recurring use of the personal pronoun as in the repeated caption on her illustrations: "photo by the author." It also shapes the character of her narrative, leading to the frequent conflation of the situation in Java with Indonesia as a whole and encouraging a propensity to let a "telling conversation" with one person (as on p. 64) stand in for a national perspective.
Unlike Golia, Strassler reflects at length on her methods and assumptions, acknowledging influences (notably, the work of Christopher Pinney and John Tagg) and directly addressing many of the complications I have already identified with the writing of national histories of photography. For example, she begins her narrative by placing the word Indonesia in quotation marks, seeking to signify its problematic status as a national entity. Calling it "that troubled collectivity known as 'Indonesia' " (p. 3), she suggests that popular photography registers "the ways that 'Indonesia' itself has been posed: as a problem, a proposition, a possibility, and a position from which to occupy that world" (p. 5). All nation-states are works in progress, but Indonesia is a particularly complex phenomenon, comprising hundreds of ethnic groups, languages, and religions occupying over 17,000 islands in a vast archipelago in Southeast Asia. As in Egypt, a struggle for national liberation, in Indonesia's case from a brutal Dutch colonial legacy, soon devolved after World War II into an autocratic system of governance dominated by two commanding figures, Sukarno and Suharto. Again, as in Egypt, a surge of popular discontent led to Suharto's resignation in 1998, after thirty-two years in power, a moment of national self-reflection that happened to coincide with Strassler's residency.
The title of Strassler's book is also a theoretical claim. Refracted Visions, its author tells us, wants to describe a process in which "everyday encounters with photographs entangle widely shared visions with affectively charged personal narratives and memories" (p. 23). Strassler claims in particular that "photography's political significance lies in the technology's traversal of intimate and public domains" (p. 4). At first glance, this traversal appears to buttress the maintenance of the nation-state. "It is through the reflexive production and circulation of images that 'imagined' social entities like nations become visible and graspable, that they come to seem to exist prior to and independent of those images" (p. 4). However, the same capacity to conjure the state also enables photography to call it into doubt. "A global technology introduced under colonial conditions and tied to transnational flows of people, capital, industry, and media, photography continues to bring people into contact with imaginings and circuits that necessarily transcend and often undermine a strictly national frame" (p. 13). As a consequence, Strassler proposes that "photographic technology embodies [a] tension between the globalized scope of modernity and the more narrow, territorialized ambitions of nationhood" (p. 13). This tension is further exacerbated by what Strassler calls "refraction," a process whereby the meanings of photographs are redirected and even transformed "as ways of seeing, modes of interpretation, and habits of practice attached to one photographic genre or representational form refract within another" (p. 26).
Strassler gives several examples of this complex process. A friend asks her to get a framed 8-by-10-inch print made from a negative taken more than forty years before for her deceased husband's identity card -- a compulsory possession for Indonesian citizens under Suharto's New Order regime. Strassler describes the resulting image in detail, its style (the subject is not quite square to the camera) and physical properties (there is the remnant of a fingerprint in one corner) as well as its new memorial functions. As she observes, its owner has "refracted and bent to more personal purposes" the identifying aims of the state, transposing this portrait image from "one realm of significance to another" (p. 27). Affectless in form, although never neutral in meaning, the ID card photograph, or pas-foto, as it is called in Indonesia, seems particularly open to this kind of transposition. Strassler spends a whole chapter tracing its role in Indonesian life, with particular emphasis on its use as a personal portrait within family contexts.
She focuses, for example, on the way many ethnic Chinese families in Indonesia began to reuse the pasfoto in funeral and ancestor worship rituals, initiating a practice that is now widespread among Christian and Islamic families as well. "The deracinated and timeless impression of the identity photograph is mobilized in its use as a commemorative image to signify the static, permanent, and radically decontextualized nature of death" (p. 150). It's a neat rhetorical slide -- maybe too neat. Strassler's assumption that death is static and permanent takes a Western, in fact, a secular, view and simply applies it to a very different cultural context. Accounts of the role of photographs in similar mourning and ancestor worship rituals in places like Korea suggest the possibility of a more complex understanding of both death and photography. As Jeehey Kim has written, "Korean funerary photo-portraiture serves neither as a memento mori nor as a signal of absence. Within the worship rituals it signals that the past-visible-presence has been transformed into a now-invisible-presence."[8] In other words, the ritualized photograph becomes a vehicle for the periodic return of the spirit of the ancestor, suspending the departed in the ghostly temporal space of a "will-be-here." Could it be, then, that the transposed pasfoto can exceed not only its state-assigned function but also its Western genealogy as a sign of "that-has-been"?9
Strassler's book privileges the ethnic Chinese community, and for good reason. Members of this minority have been the primary practitioners of photography in the postcolonial period, demonstrating their importance to any understanding of Indonesia's national modernity. They have been responsible for many of Java's professional photography studios (running two-thirds of Yogyakarta's studios in 1999) and were early targets of the pasfoto system. They have also been active members of amateur photographic societies in which various artistic visions of Indonesia and its inhabitants have been propagated. The photographs taken under these auspices favored peaceful villagers, pristine tropical nature, and folkloric "traditions," precisely the kinds of images being promulgated by the state as the "authentic" Indonesia. As Strassler points out, the irony is that "the images Chinese Indonesian amateurs produced have ultimately reinforced indigenist ideologies of national belonging that exclude them from full belonging in the nation" (p. 38). This is an irony that Strassler is keen to reiterate, as it reinforces a central premise of her book: "In Indonesia, the association of photography with the ethnic Chinese -- quintessential 'outsiders within' -- further reinforces photography's structural ambivalence as both formative of the nation and dangerously threatening to it" (p. 13).
"Photography's structural ambivalence" is also manifested in the brief but fascinating history Strassler provides of the painted backdrops in professional portrait studios in Java. This history, nicely illustrated throughout, includes Dutch scenes at first, but these gave way in the era of independence to "Indonesian" scenes, which incongruously combine nostalgic rural idylls with modern city architecture. To pose in front of such scenes was to offer a complex, even contradictory version of one's identity, allowing Indonesian portrait subjects to present themselves as simultaneously yearning for a past and at one with the trappings of urbanity and affluence. Once again, "in posing for -- and with -- the camera, people place themselves (and are placed) within the visual landscapes, temporal logics, and affective and ideological structures of Indonesia's national modernity" (p. 5).
This entanglement of present and past also informs Strassler's description of the role indexicality plays in determining photography's plausibility as a mode of certification. Her chapter about photographs taken by reformasi (reformation) student protesters presents them as both a document of their activities and a residual witness to this particular moment in history. The dual functions of such photographs demonstrate, she says, "a different aspect of photographic indexicality than is usually highlighted in accounts of photography's evidentiary status":
Rather than the indexical connection between the image and its extra-photographic referent, what is foregrounded is the indexical connection the photograph establishes between an original, embodied act of witnessing and future acts of witnessing via the image. The photograph, in this understanding, preserves and transmits the subjective act and moral force of seeing. It enables an act of seeing, located in a particular time and place, to be extended and collectivized, (p. 211)
Strassler continues to discover evidence of this kind of complication in other aspects of her research, as personified in two stories in particular -- that of professional photographer Heri Gunawan and his portraits of his daughter Laura, and that of Noorman, an elderly man determined to resuscitate the reputation and political fortunes of deposed President Sukarno. Named after a character on the American TV show Little House on the Prairie, Laura was obsessively photographed by Heri for sixteen years. The poses, backdrops, and props Laura has been asked to adopt as her own (Heri admits these photographs are to realize his dreams, not hers) are strangely eclectic, even disturbingly so. From a small girl drinking a glass of Fanta to a young woman reading a teen idol magazine to a fist-clenching reformasi student activist, these hypertheatrical portrait images dislocate the truth values that Western viewers, in our determined naïveté, like to associate with the photograph. Noorman is also invested in the truth of photographs, but to a different end. In a wallet-size image he gives to his followers, Noorman is shown sitting in a white, Sukarno-like suit, with a flare of light hovering in the vicinity of his head. No mere accident, this flare is a sign of Noorman's "divine mission to restore Indonesia to itself," with the photograph acting as a "potent object imbued with the au-ratic power of its original and capable of having effects in the world" (p. 252). Noorman's intervention within Indonesian political life, amounting to a counterhistory illustrated by "authentic copies" of photographs, is too complex to summarize here. More important is the point Strassler wants us to take away from it: "just as each genre takes its place within a broader visual field made up of multiple intersecting, competing, and contradictory visualities, so photography itself operates within a complex media ecol-ogy" (p. 292).
This emphasis on genre is a tactical one, as Strassler tells us in her introduction. She is anxious to "steer between" (p. 19) what she sees as two opposing approaches to photography, one that seeks to define the essence of the medium and the other that refuses to recognize that photography even is a singular medium. A focus on particular genres, "yielding characteristic blindnesses and visibilities" (p. 18), apparently grants her the ability to negotiate this binary opposition:
What becomes clear from the analysis of genres is how each form of photographic practice organizes and molds the more or less stable material properties of the technology to different ends… . [It] allows us to keep in view both photography's material and historical coherence as a medium and its profound malleability as it is put into the service of different kinds of projects and social actors, (p. 19)
As Strassler's own discourse demonstrates, however, it is impossible to keep both sides of this opposition in view at the same time; what her book provides is an understanding of photography so freighted with difference that it continually collapses such oppositions in on themselves. This collapse becomes explicit when she worries about the divide between Euro-American histories (such as her own) and local cultural practices. Once again, she argues it is a divide that a privileging of genre can at least complicate: "photography's genres are emergent forms fed by the confluence of numerous currents, both present and past, near and far" (p. 19). Genres, in other words, allow her to have it both ways, such that inside and outside are no longer easily distinguishable:
All the genres under consideration in this book participate in "visual economies" that extend beyond the geographical and temporal limits of "Indonesia." Yet they are also profoundly shaped by concerns and histories specific to the location of Java in the postcolonial period. It is this specificity, as well as the ways they have helped generate popular envisionings of "Indonesia," that make them "Indonesian" genres, (pp. 19-20)
Strassler's often brilliant effort to forge a discourse appropriate to the complexities of her subject points to what is ultimately at stake in all national histories: the demarcation of identity in general. Whereas "world" histories can pretend to have no limits, a national history is forced to invent a boundary for itself, thus making such boundaries visible as an act of invention. Insecure even about their own identity as independent histories, these sorts of books cannot afford to take anything for granted, whether that be their rationale for inclusion or exclusion, their choice of interpretative method, or the selection of their objects of study. As a consequence, the better national histories of photography are always experiments in critical self-consciousness. They tell us not just about the photographs produced within the borders of a particular nation-state but also about the irresolute status -- necessary but impossible -- of all such borders. This irresolution, in effect posing both nation and photography as questions rather than giv-ens, is perhaps their most provocative and enduring contribution to our discipline.

Shenoy, Ravi. "Golia, Maria. Cairo: City of Sand." Library Journal, Aug. 2004, p. 105+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA121503667&it=r. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. Rhodes, Fred. "1 Photography and Egypt." The Middle East, Mar. 2010, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA221849300&it=r. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017.

• Art Bulletin.
  
  Word count: 4315

  Photography and Egypt MARIA GOLIA London: Reaktion Books, 2010. 194 pp.; 77 color ills., 44 b/w. $29.95 Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java KAREN STRASSLER Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. 400 pp.; 32 color ills., 95 b/w. $24.95
  The appearance of books about the photography produced in Egypt and Indonesia -- following the recent publication of histories of the photography of Japan, Denmark, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Great Britain, Australia, India, China, Italy, and the United States, to name only a few -- suggests that the history of photography is in the process of being transformed beyond recognition.[1] Certainly the parameters of this field are now, at last, being stretched to include the entire globe (or so it seems). Soon, very soon, it will be impossible to know the history of photography in its entirety, in the sense that the generation brought up on Beaumont Newhall imagined it was knowable -- the history that could be told in a thousand canonical pictures.[2] The question is whether the nature of the field itself -- its ambitions, methods of analysis, narrative structures, and objects of interest -- is also undergoing radical change. An examination of these two new books invites a meditation on precisely this issue.
  If nothing else, the recent wave of national histories of photography might well be regarded as a discursive sign of the tectonic shifts occurring in the world at large. In our post-Cold War era, it seems that no nation-state can any longer be truly self-respecting until it has its own history of photography. This is surely a strange and contradictory phenomenon: at the very moment when global capitalism, mass migrations, modern transportation systems, and electronic communications have combined to make a nation-state's boundaries entirely permeable, these histories are tenaciously reiterating the notion that a national essence can be identified and described. In this context we can understand such narratives as operating in two, perhaps complementary, ways -- as nostalgic for a wholeness that never was and/or as strategically resistant to the threat of global homogenization.
  That threat is real enough. National histories of photography inevitably measure themselves against the perceived inadequacies of the existing "world" surveys of the medium. Written by American, German, or French scholars, these survey texts have never bothered to address themselves with any rigor to photographic practices outside the world's centers. The best of them -- the 1994 volume edited by Michel Frizot, which appeared in English translation in 1998 as A New History of Photography -- does not reproduce any images by African photographers, let alone Indonesian or Egyptian ones.[3] But it is not just the narrow coverage offered by this kind of survey that is now at issue; it is the imperialism reproduced in the historical method of the global survey that is up for debate, the presumption that photography is an international (meaning Euro-American) product, more or less the same wherever it is found, rather than a differentiated field of practices in which both form and meaning can be disconcertingly local. The opening challenge for national histories of photography is therefore to furnish evidence for this localism.
  It is certainly not the only challenge they face. As the first accounts in English of the medium's impact on Egypt and Indonesia, the two books under review must provide a situated history of the photography of each country without ignoring the rhyzomatic flow of bodies, images, and ideas that constitutes the modernity within which this history has occurred. In addition, they must overcome the usual art historical prejudice that regards the art of the provinces as little more than a belated, secondhand version of what has already happened in the metropolitan centers. In the words of Joel Smith: "Just as conventions of format make even a remarkable family's photo album look much like the Jones's next door, the nation-based history tends to tell a generic narrative with strangely familiar landmarks."[4] The task, again, is to persuade readers from the metropolis that photographs that look the same to them -- that appear to be mere copies of genres already familiar in the West -- may perhaps mean different things, might actually be different objects, in other places.
  It is striking that neither of the authors of these two books -- Maria Golia and Karen Strassler -- is trained in art history or the history of photography. Golia is an American-born writer of fiction and nonfiction who has lived in Cairo for twenty years, having published a history of that city in 2004.[5] Strassler, also an American, is an assistant professor of anthropology at Queens College, the City University of New York. Each speaks the language of the culture she is discussing and has spent time living in that culture. They are positioned, therefore, as both outsiders and native informants. This conflicted identity is embodied in each book by the decision to write in the first person, turning their illustrated historical commentaries into the equivalent of subjective documentaries. It is an approach that further distinguishes these books from the world surveys.
  Photography and Egypt comes to us as part of an ongoing series overseen by British historians Mark Haworth-Booth and Peter Hamilton and published in the United Kingdom by Reaktion Books. Very broadly conceived, the Exposures series already includes Photography and Australia, Photography and Spirit, Photography and Cinema, Photography and Literature, Photography and Science, Photography and Flight, Photography and Africa, Photography and Italy, and Photography and the U.S.A.[6] Copiously illustrated in color and written in an accessible style (albeit with endnotes), the series amounts to a multiau-thored, multivolume history of photography, with no end in sight. A series that can be assigned as a whole or in parts, it is likely to serve as the new standard "textbook" for the field.
  A lot could be made to hang on the "and" that splits each title in the series. It offers an opportunity for the nation-based books, for example, to investigate that nation as a photographic theme or idea rather than as a state with fixed boundaries. In that spirit, Golia begins her book with an acknowledgment of the many European photographers who worked in Egypt in the 1850s, such as Felix Teynard and Francis Frith. Subsequent chapters, which are arranged more or less chronologically, focus almost entirely on indigenous Egyptian photographers, tracing the work of important portrait studios, photojournalists, and artists. However, in her final chapter she also discusses (without illustrating) Nan Goldin's photographs from 2003 of her Egyptian lover Jabalowe, suggesting that "Egypt's sensual geographies lurk in the bend of Jaba-lowe's knee and the hollow of his back." As Golia observes, "he not only embodies Egypt: for Goldin, he probably was Egypt" (p. 156). It is to Golia's credit that she takes the trouble to trace how this sort of "Egyp-tianicity" has been propagated in photographic form, such that Goldin's images could indeed carry such a powerful connotation, for her and probably for us as well.[7]
  Photography and Egypt presents this connotation as a paradox, summing it up in a story about the transfer of an ancient statue of Ramses II from downtown Cairo to a location behind the Giza pyramids: "Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians lined the streets to watch the pharaoh's stately progress, the glowing LCD screens of their mobile phones held aloft in homage to this symbol of greatness and decline, beauty and tyranny, on its long and weary way out of town" (p. 162). Not long ago, this sentence could as plausibly have been written about Egypt's most recent pharaonic figure, President Hosni Mubarak. His overthrow in 2011, an outcome in part generated by the extensive use of so-called social media such as Facebook and Twitter, makes Golia's book a very timely one. Indeed, in her history, Egyptian photography is inextricable from its political context. As she tells us, by the turn of the twentieth century, photographically illustrated publications were employed by Egyptian nationalists to oppose both the monarchy and the country's British occupiers. Members of the Egyptian royal family, in turn, collected photographs and frequently had themselves photographed, sometimes to promote the opening of public works but more often just to broadcast their glamour and celebrity. King Farouk, in particular, engineered a flattering public image for himself as someone simultaneously fun-loving and pious, an image reiterated in the circulation of photographs of his coronation, wedding, and first child. The arrival of World War II saw Farouk grow stout and less photogenic, and his popularity plummeted accordingly.
  Farouk's abdication in 1952 was followed by the rule of three autocratic presidents drawn from the military establishment, with each commandeering all public photography for the service of the state and therefore of himself. According to Golia, photographs of the first of these autocrats, Gamal Abdel Nasser, are marked by something she calls "physicality" (p. 118). "Often photographed from behind, with his broad shoulders facing an ecstatic crowd," she explains, "his face was so well-known it didn't have to be in the picture." The efforts of his successor, Anwar Sadat, to reproduce Nasser's nonchalance before the camera were less successful. A series of color pictures presenting "a day in the life of the president," photographed by Farouk Ibrahim in 1975, showed Sadat shaving in his underwear, among other poses. The result, says Golia, "conveyed less intimacy than exhibitionism" (p. 128). In any case, images of Sadat as national icon were at odds with the poverty and corruption experienced by average Egyptians. His assassination in 1981 (killed, along with eleven others, by mutinous soldiers during a parade) saw him replaced by Mubarak, who immediately imposed an emergency law that he never lifted, "its degenerative effects on society accumulating insidiously to this day" (p. 132). Among these effects was a lack of public questioning of the state; "this censorship by omission amounted to a complicity for which Egyptians have yet to forgive the press" (p. 132). Not for the first time Golia finds herself speaking for all Egyptians, as if a homogeneous, national voice is indeed possible. Presciently, her chapter on this aspect of Egyptian photography finishes with the population's increased access to the Internet and mobile-phone cameras, and with it a circumvention of the power of state censorship. The rest, as they say, is history.
  A poignant epilogue reflects on the difficulty of writing such a history for Egyptian photography, given the paucity of archives or museums devoted to its preservation. Go-lia traces various failed or partial attempts to establish such archives, with the Arab Image Foundation based in Beirut proving to be the most substantial effort so far. It is a reminder of the centrality to Golia's account of her conversations with photographers and their families, the primary source for much of the information she passes on about the operations of professional studios in Egypt. She is able to tell us, as a result, that Sadat appreciated photographers who were able to lighten the color of his skin in their pictures. But she also provides mini-biographies for several fascinating Armenian immigrants who ran important studios in Cairo, such as Armand, Ahmed Moussa, Garo, Van Leo, and Alban. According to Golia, "taken together, the work of the studio photographers presents a luminous face of Egypt, or at least of its cities -- urbane, provocative, game -- a cultural hybrid that defies categorization" (p. 95). It is certainly hard to know in what category one should place the many hand-colored photographs made by Ahmed Moussa of his young daughter Laila. She apparently "adopted a variety of guises for her father's camera: the scrubbed-face girl in braids cuddling a puppy, the pensive student poring over books, dressed as a geisha girl, as Venus, as Faust's Gretchen, and in seductive Bedouin garb" (p. 89). Suffice it to say that another daughter from a second marriage destroyed many of the prints and negatives after her father's death.
  Refracted Visions also relies heavily on anecdotal evidence, but it is a far more substantial academic study (in both length and ambition) than Photography and Egypt. The book focuses on one particular theme: the relation of vernacular photographic practices to the development of a modern Indonesian state. This allows it to abandon the strictures of both chronology and the survey and to instead investigate six key genres in some depth: amateur photography, studio portraiture, identity photographs, family ritual photography, student photographs of demonstrations, and photographs of charismatic public figures. Working, like Golia, without easy access to public archives, Strassler based her findings on her field-work in Yogyakarta, a provincial capital in central Java where she lived between November 1998 and May 2000, drawing on personal relationships and private collections as well as her own keen observations of Indonesian life. This sense of presence is central to her account, reiterated as much in the recurring use of the personal pronoun as in the repeated caption on her illustrations: "photo by the author." It also shapes the character of her narrative, leading to the frequent conflation of the situation in Java with Indonesia as a whole and encouraging a propensity to let a "telling conversation" with one person (as on p. 64) stand in for a national perspective.
  Unlike Golia, Strassler reflects at length on her methods and assumptions, acknowledging influences (notably, the work of Christopher Pinney and John Tagg) and directly addressing many of the complications I have already identified with the writing of national histories of photography. For example, she begins her narrative by placing the word Indonesia in quotation marks, seeking to signify its problematic status as a national entity. Calling it "that troubled collectivity known as 'Indonesia' " (p. 3), she suggests that popular photography registers "the ways that 'Indonesia' itself has been posed: as a problem, a proposition, a possibility, and a position from which to occupy that world" (p. 5). All nation-states are works in progress, but Indonesia is a particularly complex phenomenon, comprising hundreds of ethnic groups, languages, and religions occupying over 17,000 islands in a vast archipelago in Southeast Asia. As in Egypt, a struggle for national liberation, in Indonesia's case from a brutal Dutch colonial legacy, soon devolved after World War II into an autocratic system of governance dominated by two commanding figures, Sukarno and Suharto. Again, as in Egypt, a surge of popular discontent led to Suharto's resignation in 1998, after thirty-two years in power, a moment of national self-reflection that happened to coincide with Strassler's residency.
  The title of Strassler's book is also a theoretical claim. Refracted Visions, its author tells us, wants to describe a process in which "everyday encounters with photographs entangle widely shared visions with affectively charged personal narratives and memories" (p. 23). Strassler claims in particular that "photography's political significance lies in the technology's traversal of intimate and public domains" (p. 4). At first glance, this traversal appears to buttress the maintenance of the nation-state. "It is through the reflexive production and circulation of images that 'imagined' social entities like nations become visible and graspable, that they come to seem to exist prior to and independent of those images" (p. 4). However, the same capacity to conjure the state also enables photography to call it into doubt. "A global technology introduced under colonial conditions and tied to transnational flows of people, capital, industry, and media, photography continues to bring people into contact with imaginings and circuits that necessarily transcend and often undermine a strictly national frame" (p. 13). As a consequence, Strassler proposes that "photographic technology embodies [a] tension between the globalized scope of modernity and the more narrow, territorialized ambitions of nationhood" (p. 13). This tension is further exacerbated by what Strassler calls "refraction," a process whereby the meanings of photographs are redirected and even transformed "as ways of seeing, modes of interpretation, and habits of practice attached to one photographic genre or representational form refract within another" (p. 26).
  Strassler gives several examples of this complex process. A friend asks her to get a framed 8-by-10-inch print made from a negative taken more than forty years before for her deceased husband's identity card -- a compulsory possession for Indonesian citizens under Suharto's New Order regime. Strassler describes the resulting image in detail, its style (the subject is not quite square to the camera) and physical properties (there is the remnant of a fingerprint in one corner) as well as its new memorial functions. As she observes, its owner has "refracted and bent to more personal purposes" the identifying aims of the state, transposing this portrait image from "one realm of significance to another" (p. 27). Affectless in form, although never neutral in meaning, the ID card photograph, or pas-foto, as it is called in Indonesia, seems particularly open to this kind of transposition. Strassler spends a whole chapter tracing its role in Indonesian life, with particular emphasis on its use as a personal portrait within family contexts.
  She focuses, for example, on the way many ethnic Chinese families in Indonesia began to reuse the pasfoto in funeral and ancestor worship rituals, initiating a practice that is now widespread among Christian and Islamic families as well. "The deracinated and timeless impression of the identity photograph is mobilized in its use as a commemorative image to signify the static, permanent, and radically decontextualized nature of death" (p. 150). It's a neat rhetorical slide -- maybe too neat. Strassler's assumption that death is static and permanent takes a Western, in fact, a secular, view and simply applies it to a very different cultural context. Accounts of the role of photographs in similar mourning and ancestor worship rituals in places like Korea suggest the possibility of a more complex understanding of both death and photography. As Jeehey Kim has written, "Korean funerary photo-portraiture serves neither as a memento mori nor as a signal of absence. Within the worship rituals it signals that the past-visible-presence has been transformed into a now-invisible-presence."[8] In other words, the ritualized photograph becomes a vehicle for the periodic return of the spirit of the ancestor, suspending the departed in the ghostly temporal space of a "will-be-here." Could it be, then, that the transposed pasfoto can exceed not only its state-assigned function but also its Western genealogy as a sign of "that-has-been"?9
  Strassler's book privileges the ethnic Chinese community, and for good reason. Members of this minority have been the primary practitioners of photography in the postcolonial period, demonstrating their importance to any understanding of Indonesia's national modernity. They have been responsible for many of Java's professional photography studios (running two-thirds of Yogyakarta's studios in 1999) and were early targets of the pasfoto system. They have also been active members of amateur photographic societies in which various artistic visions of Indonesia and its inhabitants have been propagated. The photographs taken under these auspices favored peaceful villagers, pristine tropical nature, and folkloric "traditions," precisely the kinds of images being promulgated by the state as the "authentic" Indonesia. As Strassler points out, the irony is that "the images Chinese Indonesian amateurs produced have ultimately reinforced indigenist ideologies of national belonging that exclude them from full belonging in the nation" (p. 38). This is an irony that Strassler is keen to reiterate, as it reinforces a central premise of her book: "In Indonesia, the association of photography with the ethnic Chinese -- quintessential 'outsiders within' -- further reinforces photography's structural ambivalence as both formative of the nation and dangerously threatening to it" (p. 13).
  "Photography's structural ambivalence" is also manifested in the brief but fascinating history Strassler provides of the painted backdrops in professional portrait studios in Java. This history, nicely illustrated throughout, includes Dutch scenes at first, but these gave way in the era of independence to "Indonesian" scenes, which incongruously combine nostalgic rural idylls with modern city architecture. To pose in front of such scenes was to offer a complex, even contradictory version of one's identity, allowing Indonesian portrait subjects to present themselves as simultaneously yearning for a past and at one with the trappings of urbanity and affluence. Once again, "in posing for -- and with -- the camera, people place themselves (and are placed) within the visual landscapes, temporal logics, and affective and ideological structures of Indonesia's national modernity" (p. 5).
  This entanglement of present and past also informs Strassler's description of the role indexicality plays in determining photography's plausibility as a mode of certification. Her chapter about photographs taken by reformasi (reformation) student protesters presents them as both a document of their activities and a residual witness to this particular moment in history. The dual functions of such photographs demonstrate, she says, "a different aspect of photographic indexicality than is usually highlighted in accounts of photography's evidentiary status":
  Rather than the indexical connection between the image and its extra-photographic referent, what is foregrounded is the indexical connection the photograph establishes between an original, embodied act of witnessing and future acts of witnessing via the image. The photograph, in this understanding, preserves and transmits the subjective act and moral force of seeing. It enables an act of seeing, located in a particular time and place, to be extended and collectivized, (p. 211)
  Strassler continues to discover evidence of this kind of complication in other aspects of her research, as personified in two stories in particular -- that of professional photographer Heri Gunawan and his portraits of his daughter Laura, and that of Noorman, an elderly man determined to resuscitate the reputation and political fortunes of deposed President Sukarno. Named after a character on the American TV show Little House on the Prairie, Laura was obsessively photographed by Heri for sixteen years. The poses, backdrops, and props Laura has been asked to adopt as her own (Heri admits these photographs are to realize his dreams, not hers) are strangely eclectic, even disturbingly so. From a small girl drinking a glass of Fanta to a young woman reading a teen idol magazine to a fist-clenching reformasi student activist, these hypertheatrical portrait images dislocate the truth values that Western viewers, in our determined naïveté, like to associate with the photograph. Noorman is also invested in the truth of photographs, but to a different end. In a wallet-size image he gives to his followers, Noorman is shown sitting in a white, Sukarno-like suit, with a flare of light hovering in the vicinity of his head. No mere accident, this flare is a sign of Noorman's "divine mission to restore Indonesia to itself," with the photograph acting as a "potent object imbued with the au-ratic power of its original and capable of having effects in the world" (p. 252). Noorman's intervention within Indonesian political life, amounting to a counterhistory illustrated by "authentic copies" of photographs, is too complex to summarize here. More important is the point Strassler wants us to take away from it: "just as each genre takes its place within a broader visual field made up of multiple intersecting, competing, and contradictory visualities, so photography itself operates within a complex media ecol-ogy" (p. 292).
  This emphasis on genre is a tactical one, as Strassler tells us in her introduction. She is anxious to "steer between" (p. 19) what she sees as two opposing approaches to photography, one that seeks to define the essence of the medium and the other that refuses to recognize that photography even is a singular medium. A focus on particular genres, "yielding characteristic blindnesses and visibilities" (p. 18), apparently grants her the ability to negotiate this binary opposition:
  What becomes clear from the analysis of genres is how each form of photographic practice organizes and molds the more or less stable material properties of the technology to different ends… . [It] allows us to keep in view both photography's material and historical coherence as a medium and its profound malleability as it is put into the service of different kinds of projects and social actors, (p. 19)
  As Strassler's own discourse demonstrates, however, it is impossible to keep both sides of this opposition in view at the same time; what her book provides is an understanding of photography so freighted with difference that it continually collapses such oppositions in on themselves. This collapse becomes explicit when she worries about the divide between Euro-American histories (such as her own) and local cultural practices. Once again, she argues it is a divide that a privileging of genre can at least complicate: "photography's genres are emergent forms fed by the confluence of numerous currents, both present and past, near and far" (p. 19). Genres, in other words, allow her to have it both ways, such that inside and outside are no longer easily distinguishable:
  All the genres under consideration in this book participate in "visual economies" that extend beyond the geographical and temporal limits of "Indonesia." Yet they are also profoundly shaped by concerns and histories specific to the location of Java in the postcolonial period. It is this specificity, as well as the ways they have helped generate popular envisionings of "Indonesia," that make them "Indonesian" genres, (pp. 19-20)
  Strassler's often brilliant effort to forge a discourse appropriate to the complexities of her subject points to what is ultimately at stake in all national histories: the demarcation of identity in general. Whereas "world" histories can pretend to have no limits, a national history is forced to invent a boundary for itself, thus making such boundaries visible as an act of invention. Insecure even about their own identity as independent histories, these sorts of books cannot afford to take anything for granted, whether that be their rationale for inclusion or exclusion, their choice of interpretative method, or the selection of their objects of study. As a consequence, the better national histories of photography are always experiments in critical self-consciousness. They tell us not just about the photographs produced within the borders of a particular nation-state but also about the irresolute status -- necessary but impossible -- of all such borders. This irresolution, in effect posing both nation and photography as questions rather than giv-ens, is perhaps their most provocative and enduring contribution to our discipline.

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