Kampung Bandan is a (city) village located right in the middle of Jakarta (borderline between North Jakarta and Central Jakarta to be exact). Not far away from Sunda Kelapa harbour.
Currently this place start to become popular for street photographers in Jakarta due to easy access to reach, unique environment, and friendly residences.
I came there last month while there is a little street photography event held by collaboration of Fujifilm Indonesia and Indonesia Street Project. Thanks to both parties to create such great event!
There are several points that make Kampung Bandan considered has unique location:
Railway station
Kampung Bandan is there, right in the middle of railway station. Yes, you read it right, most houses here are located right beside of railway (active railway) without any visible barrier between them.
People will do their daily activities side by side with any trains that passed them. Do not worry too much though, all train there move in really low speed (less than 10 km/h I guess) and people will shout the warning one to each other every time a train appear from far away.
Residence area
Mind you, the residence place itself is really crowd and has tight-to-none gap between one house to the others. I found there is no way to photograph people there without being notice. It does not matter how small your camera or even use smartphone, people will easily notice that we take photo of a person.
Luckily, people there are friendly and as far as I know they do not have problem with being photographed, as long as we ask permission first of course. Perfect chance to someone who focus on documenting human life or want to create any kind of documentary photography about Kampung Bandan.
Talk to them, communicate to them, respect them, give greeting and smile. My experience showed me they would do exactly the same to us.
Abandoned open space
Not far from the residence area, there is a big and abandoned open space that people use to put their unused stuff, trash or leftover of any building/furniture material.
From this site we easily able to see why Kampung Bandan is unique, because this area is clearly a village, but surrounded by modern buildings (hotel, apartment, shopping mall, etc). The contrast between small houses inside village compare to giant buildings around them. The contrast between poverty inside village to modern and luxury life of metropolitan city around them.
Bright, big, and open space area is always my favourite spot to start hunting for silhouette of people that focus on their face contour, moving gesture, and layering between subjects/objects.
Lens selection
As you know that I’m a prime lens user, and always working on a project with only one lens at a time; to choose a lens for Kampung Bandan could be a little tricky. A 35mm lens still shows great versatility and could be my best suggestion. There were few times when I felt it was not wide enough to shoot layers inside residence area, but I think I can experiment to shoot in various angles (extreme low or high angle) to get a shot that I want.
Another standard lens “the nifty fifty” definitely lack of wideness that I need, and 24mm lens require me getting close to subjects which is sometimes can be impossible to captured workers who work at abandoned area (Some of them did not allow us got too close for safety reason).
That is all my experience about Kampung Bandan. Definitely a place that I’m still curious about. I want to go back there again to search more creative art objects, and unveil more stories about people who live inside there!
Keep explore,
Nico Harold