Photos

During our stay in Lombok we visited the covered market of Sweta, the most important one on the isle of Lombok. In this third posting of the Indonesia mini-series a Sweta tobacconist is displayed. The tobacco spread out on his table produced a lovely smell and looked great. After we showed interest the tobacconist rolled us a cigarette, kept together by a thin thread, and it was a fine smoke. So we ordered 250 gr. He looks sophisticated and with definite professional pride while working with the tobacco.

Working on old photos is a delight. They get a new life, you discover new details and while editing them dear memories roll in. In the case of the Indonesia pics I also couldn’t help thinking about the things that happened in Indonesia the last 10 years.

We visited Lombok in 1995 while the government of Suharto was still in place. In this period it was already changing rapidly because of the tourism development scheme of this government, which displaced the small scale local providers of tourist services by large investors from outside the island. During our stay there we heard sad tales about it. For instance the houses and small apartments of Gili Air (a small isle a few miles from the Lombok coast) were razed two times in a row to get the inhabitants to leave and make place for the investors. In 1997 there were demonstrations about the economic and political situation and after that the island had to endure the social-political crisis which rocked Indonesia violently in the late nineties and the beginning of the new millennium. The level of integration amongst the various ethnic/faith groups of the island was lowered due to this and the tourist trade has still a very hard time to recover.

The postings of this mini series are all scanned from photos with my Epson 2450 photo scanner, at 800 dpi for decent PP-headroom.
PCS: Desaturated, adjusted levels, curves & contrast, ran Noiseware, USM-ed, added a frame, saved for the web.