Blogger Indonesia of the Week (60): Bunyamin Najmi

Posted on September 7, 2007
Filed Under Blogger Indonesia, Blogger of Week, Fatih Syuhud, Indonesia

Reporting Indonesia to the World through Picture

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” (Aaron Siskind).

Photography is an activity I am not at all good at. I used to have two cameras, conventional and digital, most of the time both are at my friend hands; a strong indication that I’m not so interested at this stuff. Finally I sold the digital camera half the original price. Having said that, photography is one of most important activity as far as journalism goes. News report in print media will be less spicy without it. Yet hardly any photographer gets sufficient appreciation.

Just imagine how you can fully enjoy a recently long reports on blogging in Tempo Magazine–the first of its kind by any Indonesian news magazine– without any photograph in it; imagine how boring it would be without the pretty picture of Tiara Lestari, or without the circle beard, Andre Agassi style, photo of Enda Nasution.

Photography, therefore, is a must to make any analysis or news report more interesting and more colorful to the readers and more importantly more credible and look more ‘trustworthy.’

Yet, not many people are interested to it which suggests, among other reasons, the lack of appreciation in this profession. In the blogger world, especially in Indonesia, that tendency is not different. Not many Indonesian bloggers dedicate themselves to photoblogging unless photography really are their passion. And among those few are Bunyamnin Najmi who posts his photography activity almost on daily basis. His blog also attracts many English-speaking viewers from around the world. The reason is obvious: he makes commentary on any posted picture in English.

Bunyamin seems to be able to capture many interesting daily events in his surrounding with a very good sense of photographer. Well, I’m not authoritative to judge what good and bad sense in photography. I just take that conclusion from the commenters of his blog which seems excited and sometimes surprised.

I hope he’ll keep up his photograph blogging passion, his own unique way to tell the world about Indonesia in general and about Bandung, West Java, in particular to the world.