A Box of Photographs - Enam

Photograph #21

The boy and girl on a motorbike, viewed from behind. A long road stretches out into the distance; the bike is small, dwarfed by the vastness of the scenery. Hills and fields and coconut trees. They are driving into the rising sun, everything is blessed with white-gold light. The roadside is lined with white hibiscus flowers, glowing like stars against night black leaves. You wonder, once more, who took the photograph. Or if, indeed, it was just a memory, projected onto glossy paper. But whose memory?

Photographs #22-34

These photographs seem to have been taken in quick succession, as though the photographer held down the shutter button, leaving it to take photo after photo as the bike flew past. They must have been taken by the girl. You imagine her, one hand round the boy's waist, the other holding the camera. Both hands holding on for dear life. Click click click. Dangerous photographs of a fleeting landscape, falling into the past faster than the eye could take in. You flip through and feel a little as though you, too, were sitting on the back of a motorbike zooming round Lombok's southern coast. Photos of school children and chickens and herds of cows, trees and rice paddies, mothers and babies, wooden huts and the great, majestic domes of village mosques, looming up, blue and green and gold, out of the banana trees. Click, click, click.

Photograph #35

This photo startles you, slightly. In it, an enormous manta ray. Beached, not on the sea shore, but on dry, dusty earth. Dead. Its vast wings imply a bygone grace, now irrevocably lost. Its great great back is parched, and from its wide, gentle mouth, dark blood falls into the dirt.
On the back of the photograph is written, 'Fish market, Tanjung Luar'.

Photograph #36

This is a photograph, you imagine, from the same market place, only, there are no fish. The picture shows and old man, sat on a mat on the ground. Spread out on the mat are hundreds of small, flame-red chillies. The man is cast in shadow, but the chillies are bathed in a swathe of sunlight, and they glow, fire-bright. The man's face is edged with a faint red glow. His eyes are turned upwards towards the photographer, his mouth, open in amazement, or shock. Before his unexpected western customers, words, it seems, have failed him.

Photographs #37-54

Back on the road; more photographs taken from the back of a motorbike. They passed through small towns and villages; roadside fruit stalls, all-purpose stores, mechanics, mosques, rows of roosters in palm-leaf cages. A school with a long line of school girls streaming in, white head scarves stretching out along the road until vanishing point. They pass onwards through volcanic countryside, rice paddies cut into swollen black earth, huge dark boulders, beaches with coal-black sand. All the while, the mountains in the background loom larger in each shot, and the road slopes steeper up hill. The last photograph of the series is stunning. A wide vista in the dying evening light, showing acres of rice fields, penned in by hills draped in rich forest. And in the background, an enormous mountain, wreathed in white cloud. On the back of the photo it says, 'A view of Rinjani, from Senaru.'