Not Nothing, Not Enough
I am a father of two, I live in Jakarta.
Another day in the car with my sons, on a road I dread. I zone out, watching traffic move in fragments, my body sore from hours in one position. But my sons are entertained by everything they can see—taking photos from their car seats, laughing with each other at the cars and buses stuck beside us, cheering at the motorbikes that slip past. They are not waiting for the road to end. They are already somewhere worth being.
A few years ago I was in Qatar, inside Al Shaqab, a facility built for horses. I felt something shift. The scale of intention was immense: rooms designed around a body's specific needs, detailed resource allocation, architecture as an act of care. I wish I were a horse, I said. I wish I were the body the building exists for.
Then my gaze returns home, to a city built around an average body that is neither mine nor my sons'. Seats that do not fit. Crossings that do not wait. Stairs that assume no one is carrying a child. We adjust, constantly, until the adjusting becomes invisible. My sons have never stood in a space made for them, so they feel no lack. I used to think that was the saddest part. Lately I wonder if it is also a kind of freedom.
So I photographed the city through the eyes I now carry as a parent. The wish: greenery over concrete, the daydream of open air. The acceptance: lifts stuck between stories, rotten stairs climbed because of it. Traffic that distills into a child's plain fun in the back seat. And the quiet work all around us: spare land turned into a football field, whatever was available turned into a playground—nothing natural, only what the budget could carry, but every piece of it somebody's best. Not nothing. Not enough. Somewhere in between, and held there by people who keep trying. Even a walled, guarded neighborhood, which may look like excess, is really the least we could assemble to give our children safe ground to run on, built by ourselves because no one built it for us.
In Al Shaqab, a society decided a body was worth caring for, and built it publicly. At home, we have decided the same, we are only still learning how to build it for more than our own. To become a parent is to negotiate a future we cannot control. What I photograph is what I cannot fix. And I do not know whether attending to it this closely is resistance or acceptance—or whether, for a parent, those were ever two different things.
My sons are still in the back seat, photographing a city I am learning to wish with them rather than only for them. They think it is already worth it. Maybe they are teaching me how to see it.
