ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how creative repurposing of networked photographs and online interactivity may open new channels and networks for the critical re-evaluation of mainstream culture and subcultures, identity politics, history and power structures. Agan Harahap began exploring the mutability and malleability of the digital photograph in the context of his professional practice as digital imaging artist at Tarzan Photo Studio in Jakarta, where he mastered the skills of digital retouching and layering of photographic images. Harahap’s self-evident but seamless digital manipulation, which accentuates the artificiality of the photograph, marked a rupture with the stagnant tradition of documentary photography that dominated the photography scene in postcolonial Indonesia for over half a century. Harahap’s digital work marked a new direction for creative photographic practice that equally challenged the nation’s cultural preconceptions about race, gender, national identity, sexuality, faith and class. The photographs in his series Superhistory are digital collages of historical photographs sourced online in which popular superheroes have been digitally inserted.
