Curiosity, Surprise, Constant Exploration with @dita_alangkara
To see more vibrant photos from Jakarta and elsewhere, follow @dita_alangkara on Instagram.
Like countless people around the world, Indonesian photojournalist Dita Alangkara (@dita_alangkara) commutes to work. Unlike most of those people, Dita enjoys the ride. “Jakarta, where I live, is huge — a city of ten million people and really crowded, so traffic is crazy here,” he says. “I commute on the bus so I have a lot of time to observe, and I enjoy working in this traffic chaos.” Some of his most thoughtful pictures are made in the midst of colossal traffic jams.
Dita, 40, started shooting when he was in his teens (he’s been a professional photographer since 1997), so he’s had a good, long time to hone his craft. When he first started, though, it was as much the camera as the pictures he made that he fell in love with.
“My dad had a small range-finder camera when I was a kid,” Dita says, “and he let me play around with it, and that was the point when I really got fascinated by photography. The technology was so amazing. You could take an image of something and print it out and show friends or family members, and to me that was just incredible. In my hometown in central Java, a camera was a rare thing back then.”
And he still has the same drive to make beautiful images today.
“Curiosity is something that every photographer should have, I think,” Dita says. “Curiosity is what brings us to new places. It helps us to refresh our eyes, to refresh our minds, gives us new ideas. Curiosity, surprise, constant exploration. That’s it. That’s what keeps us going.”
Perhaps it’s that very curiosity — as well as a vivid imagination — that allows Dita to appreciate other aspects of the everyday that might go unremarked by the rest of us.
“You know,” he says, “when I’m commuting and I’m surrounded by all of these people, on the bus or on bicycles or motorbikes, I see them as heroes, because they sacrifice themselves, in a way. Public transportation in Jakarta is really not very good. There are so many very, very old buses operating here. But all of these people take public transportation to get to work. Maybe they have to, because they can’t afford cars or motorbikes,” he adds. “But unwittingly, I guess, they become heroes for others. Imagine if they bought their own cars! People would be stuck in even crazier traffic jams.”
For his part, Dita might not see himself as a hero, but he also doesn’t see himself giving up his commute anytime soon. After all, he gets much of his inspiration from his daily travels. “It can be powerful, or it can be nothing,” he says of his adventures on Jakarta’s streets. “Like today, I took three buses today and I got nothing. But on another day I might get on one bus and get 10, 20 pictures. You never know what you’ll see next. That’s what I like.”
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