Let me start this column with a confession. As a teenager  I often fantasized about becoming a photojournalist. The still images taken by the likes of Robert Ca pa led me to daydream about my own future missions on the front lines of human action and horror. To travel the world and all of its trouble spots cataloguing on film the pain and photos of our time seemed to hold much promise for a young boy growing up in the peaceful, but seemingly stagnant boredom of a middle-class north shore Sydney upbringing. There were two blatant realities that my teenage fantasy refused to face-my own healthy sense of self preservation (a positive spin perhaps on cowardice) and the fact that, try as I might, I exhibited absolutely no talent for photography.

I did however channel my love of images into a lifelong engagement  with film both of the moving and still varieties and if the world’s war zone have subsequently been spared the weight of my clumsy footprints, the world’s classrooms have been perhaps less fortunate. In that spirit of engagement, I have begun to assemble a modest but growing collection of local photography since arriving in Penang island, west of Malaysian and seek out in earnest the works of regional photographers exhibited here.

The academic in me needs to often avoid having my aesthetic responses to images shaped by the lofty weight of contested theorising. I like the written observations on photography by a number of writers, Susan Sontag springing instantly to mind, but given the ambiguous freshness of the still image, I prefer to let the images themselves attempt to command the discourse. The Goethe-Institute recently organized a most intriguing exhibition of works by contemporary Southeast Asian photographers at the Annexe here in Penang island. Mapping Invisible Cities raised for me a number of issues about the state of current photography and also of that vexed and problematic idea of Southeast Asian identity.

The exhibition showcased works by regional photographers who had taken part in a series of workshops conducted across the region by the German based photographers, Peter Bialobrzeski, of Hamburg. The subsequent exhibition was curated  by Indonesian Alex Hartono. The original project aimed to uncover, as the exhibition catalogue claims, ‘… a specific Southeast Asian way of seeing, a unique artistic view of the local urban reality…’ an aim that appears to have been largely unsuccessful mainly due to an acknowledgement that the ambition itself was a ‘European projection’.