Although award-winning art director and photographer Ali Akbar has built a successful career in the advertising industry, he has shown a willingness to bite the hand the feeds him. He shares his unique view of the world with M. Taufiqurrahman.
In February this year, a glossy billboard in South Jakarta announced that a new fashion house was offering an 80 percent discount at its "opening sale".
The billboard featured a polished shot of a model wearing a stylish dress and shoes and carrying a handbag, with the brand name splashed across the lot. Those wanting to know more could visit the brand's Facebook page or company website.
Dozens of people made online queries, some made proposals for business partnerships and others logged on to check out the products.
Until Facebook took down the page, that is.
Perhaps The brand name-"Fakery"-should have clued them in that no such company existed and that they had been part of perhaps the biggest ever hoodwinking of Jakarta's overzealous shoppers.
Behind the joke was Ali Akbar, an award-winning art director and photographer who has built a career in the advertising industry yet still tries to live by his conscience.
"I just wanted to remind people how stupid people are when it comes to foreign brands," Akbar says. "I meant this to be satire really."
The stunt could have landed Akbar in legal trouble but he got away with it because it was part of the art festival Jakarta Biennale 2009, an event fully endorsed by the Jakarta City administration.
Although Akbar is part of the advertising industry and counts advertising bigwigs among his clients-helping them sell cigarettes, sweets, undergarments and banking services-he can also step back to take a critical look at what goes on.
"I have to admit that the industry itself shares the blame for all the excess," he says."
Still, it's not an outright condemnation. "The advertising industry is an inseparable part of pop culture. In fact, we can trace the cultural development though advertising. In ads we can see the confluence of music, movies and literature."
And if a basic requirement for working in the advertising industry in fluency in pop culture, the 35-year-old was well prepared.
Raised on a steady diet of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors and the Sex Pistols from his father's music collection, Akbar enrolled in the Graphic Design Department at the Jakarta Institute of Arts (IKJ) simply to indulge his obsessive passion for the legendary bands' cover art.
It was apparent that gazing far too long at covers of the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers or the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols seriously affected him.
In the early 1990s, when his peers were drawn to the Seattle Sound, to the music of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sound garden, Akbar was more interested in the record sleeves that Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, designed for the band's classic album Vitalogy, Yield and No Code.
His long hours of watching Hollywood films and poring over comic books also left a lasting impression.
"If you pay close attention to my work, you will see James Bond posters here and the Lucky Luke character there," Akbar says, referring to the fictional British spy and a comic book character created by French-Belgian writer Rene Goscinny.
A graphic design focus may not have landed Akbar a job as a sleeve designer for big rock bands, but it did give him the credentials to work with some big names in advertising, even without having to complete his studies at the IKJ.
"Going to school for five years and finishing on time was not the definition of success for me," Akbar says of why he dropped out of art school.
Akbar soon made a name for himself in the business of image-making and consumer persuasion. His take on the "I'm lovin' it" campaign for fast-food giant McDonald's in Indonesia was selected as the best in the region in 2003. During his time with advertising agency Leo Burnett Kreasindo, Akbar designed a campaign for telecom company Telkomsel that won him an award at the Citra Pariwara ad industry honors and showcase at a trade event in London.
After the success of the McDonald's campaign, Akbar saw an opportunity to use advertising as a way to promote religious pluralism. Raise as a Muslim, Akbar was upset by attacks on nightclubs in Kemang, South Jakarta, by members of a hard-line religious group.
In a pitch to a client, he used a picture of a local woman wearing a jilbab (headscraf). In Jakarta today, that alone would not raise any eyebrows. But his tagline-"I'm a Muslim and open minded"-might save. The client rejected the ad.
It was similar to a message Akbar had delivered before in his work for "Right Wing Violence", an art exhibition organized by the Goethe Institute in 2003. In a work designed to shock, Ali slapped the words pengacau (troublemaker) and perusak (vandal) on photos of two five-years-olds in white Islamic outfits.
It was sufficiently provocative to anger some Muslim activists. "But they finally got the message that everyone must make an effort not to taint the got image of Islam and being a Muslim," he says.
Akbar is sceptical toward organized religions in general, something that he once again attributes to rock and roll. "It might have been something that I read in books, but John Lennon's words in imagine inspired me more," he says.
But rock and roll was involved in Akbar's discovery of a love for photography, which came much earlier.
Akbar started experimenting with photography when he was in elementary school. He took photographs, pasted them onto scraps of paper, photocopied them and tried to sell them as newspapers.
No one bought the newspapers, but more than three decades later one of Akbar's photographs not only appeared in a real publications, the prestigious American Photo magazine, but also garnered an honourable mention in magazine's special "Images of the Year" issued, published in January 2009.
Not mean feat for someone who had only seriously taken up photography four years earlier.
For the photo, Akbar took a shot of a dour-looking couple in their living room-or possibly bedroom-dressed only in their undergarments, surrounded by all the mementos they had accumulated throughout their lives. (the man in the photo is artist Irwan Ahmett).
Toys, books, stuffed animals, clocks, clothes and other objects were strewn across the floor and piled up behind the couple as if forming a fortress for their solitude, despite the vibrant colours Akbar used.
"For this shot, I was inspired by Rothko. He was capable of conveying emptiness and vacuity with bold colours," Akbar says, referring to Mark Rothko, an American abstract painter known for splashing bold colours onto the canvas and for using numbers and colours as the titles of his works.
Another influence Akbar cited is the Israeli-bred, London-based photographer Nadav Kander, who achieved with photography what Rothko did with painting-despite his use of brilliant colours, the only emotion he conveyed was emptiness.
"Figures like Henry Cartier-Bresson or Diane Arbus were the ones who captured the moment, akin to photojournalism. On the other hand, what an art photographer does is put models into the studio and take photos of them," Akbar says.
But Kander, Akbar says, transcends the boundary between them. "His photography is not about technical issues, lighting, directing and all that. It is not about capturing the moment but instead it's an attempt to create a moment."
The greatest lesson Akbar learned from Kander, he says, is that photography is art and that technology counts very little in the making of that art. "I may be able to replicate a certain photographer's technique in lighting but copying a directing style will be impossible as it involves experience in real life," he says.
In fact, he believes technology has turned photography into a degenerate art.
"Photography used to be good, but digital technology killed what's left a good ol' photography."
In a pitch to a client, he used a picture of a local woman wearing a jilbab (headscraf). In Jakarta today, that alone would not raise any eyebrows. But his tagline-"I'm a Muslim and open minded"-might save. The client rejected the ad.
It was similar to a message Akbar had delivered before in his work for "Right Wing Violence", an art exhibition organized by the Goethe Institute in 2003. In a work designed to shock, Ali slapped the words pengacau (troublemaker) and perusak (vandal) on photos of two five-years-olds in white Islamic outfits.
It was sufficiently provocative to anger some Muslim activists. "But they finally got the message that everyone must make an effort not to taint the got image of Islam and being a Muslim," he says.
Akbar is sceptical toward organized religions in general, something that he once again attributes to rock and roll. "It might have been something that I read in books, but John Lennon's words in imagine inspired me more," he says.
But rock and roll was involved in Akbar's discovery of a love for photography, which came much earlier.
Akbar started experimenting with photography when he was in elementary school. He took photographs, pasted them onto scraps of paper, photocopied them and tried to sell them as newspapers.
No one bought the newspapers, but more than three decades later one of Akbar's photographs not only appeared in a real publications, the prestigious American Photo magazine, but also garnered an honourable mention in magazine's special "Images of the Year" issued, published in January 2009.
Not mean feat for someone who had only seriously taken up photography four years earlier.
For the photo, Akbar took a shot of a dour-looking couple in their living room-or possibly bedroom-dressed only in their undergarments, surrounded by all the mementos they had accumulated throughout their lives. (the man in the photo is artist Irwan Ahmett).
Toys, books, stuffed animals, clocks, clothes and other objects were strewn across the floor and piled up behind the couple as if forming a fortress for their solitude, despite the vibrant colours Akbar used.
"For this shot, I was inspired by Rothko. He was capable of conveying emptiness and vacuity with bold colours," Akbar says, referring to Mark Rothko, an American abstract painter known for splashing bold colours onto the canvas and for using numbers and colours as the titles of his works.
Another influence Akbar cited is the Israeli-bred, London-based photographer Nadav Kander, who achieved with photography what Rothko did with painting-despite his use of brilliant colours, the only emotion he conveyed was emptiness.
"Figures like Henry Cartier-Bresson or Diane Arbus were the ones who captured the moment, akin to photojournalism. On the other hand, what an art photographer does is put models into the studio and take photos of them," Akbar says.
But Kander, Akbar says, transcends the boundary between them. "His photography is not about technical issues, lighting, directing and all that. It is not about capturing the moment but instead it's an attempt to create a moment."
The greatest lesson Akbar learned from Kander, he says, is that photography is art and that technology counts very little in the making of that art. "I may be able to replicate a certain photographer's technique in lighting but copying a directing style will be impossible as it involves experience in real life," he says.
In fact, he believes technology has turned photography into a degenerate art.
"Photography used to be good, but digital technology killed what's left a good ol' photography."
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