Journal
Photographing Karangasem: the east Bali most visitors drive past
Karangasem is the east of the island — the regency that starts where the traffic thins out past Klungkung and runs to the tip of Bali. It contains water palaces, a dead volcano that everyone photographs from somewhere else, black sand, and a working agricultural economy that has very little to do with the Bali most people arrive to see.
It is roughly two hours from Denpasar and about ninety minutes from Ubud, which is far enough that day-trip traffic mostly doesn't bother. That distance is the whole point. What it buys you is not scenery — the scenery is incidental — but the ordinary rhythm of a place that has not organised itself around being looked at.
Where the light is
The east coast faces the sunrise, which sounds obvious and changes everything about how you plan a day. On the south coast you shoot the end of the day; here the good light arrives at five in the morning and is gone by half past eight. Afternoons are usually hazy, often building to rain in the wet season, and the last hour before dark is soft rather than golden because the sun goes down behind the mountains rather than into the sea.
Practically, that means the day inverts. You are out before first light, back by mid-morning, and the middle of the day is for eating, editing and sleeping. If you try to work a European schedule here you will spend the best three hours of every day asleep and the worst six hours walking around in flat white glare.
The water palaces
Tirta Gangga and Taman Ujung are the two that appear on every itinerary, and they are both worth photographing, with a caveat. They were built as royal water gardens by the last raja of Karangasem, rebuilt after the 1963 eruption of Agung, and they are now managed sites with entrance fees and, by mid-morning, coach parties.
The photographs everyone comes back with — stepping stones, koi, a symmetrical reflection — are the photographs the place is designed to produce. There is nothing wrong with them and there is nothing much in them either. What is more interesting is the maintenance: the people who clean the pools, the school groups on outings, the wedding parties, the local families who use Tirta Gangga as a swimming pool because that is what it is. Get there when it opens, photograph for the first hour, and then stay another hour after you think you are finished. The second hour is when the place stops performing.
Amlapura and the inland villages
Amlapura is the regency capital and almost nobody photographs it. It has a market, a bus terminal, a puri, and about eight thousand people going about a Tuesday. It is not picturesque and that is precisely why it repays attention — the visual language of a working Indonesian town is far less documented than the visual language of Balinese ritual.
Inland from the coast road, the villages climbing towards Agung are where the ceremonial life of the regency actually happens. This is not a secret and it is not a discovery; it is simply that the road up is worse and the villages are not on the way to anywhere. There are temple anniversaries happening somewhere in Karangasem more or less constantly, and a village odalan with thirty people at it is a completely different photographic proposition to a large temple with a coach park.
Black sand
The coast from Amed round to Tulamben is volcanic — grey-black sand, clear water, and a fishing economy that starts before dawn. The jukung outriggers go out in the dark and come back between six and seven, which coincides exactly with the only good light of the day.
Tulamben has the wreck of the USAT Liberty a few metres offshore, which means it also has a dive industry, which means it has more foreigners than the villages either side of it. Amed is a string of small bays rather than a single village. Both are photographable. The thing to avoid is the impulse to make a landscape out of it: the black sand and the water make a very easy graphic image, and the easy graphic image is one everyone has already made.
Sidemen
The Sidemen valley, technically the western edge of the regency, is the terraced landscape that Ubud was thirty years ago and is now being marketed as such, which means it is changing quickly. It is genuinely beautiful and it is genuinely being built on. Both of those things are photographable, and the second is more interesting than the first.
Working there
A few practical things that are easy to get wrong.
Transport. You need a driver or your own bike. There is no useful public transport and the distances between the coast, Amlapura and the inland villages are longer than the map suggests because the roads climb. Budget an hour to get anywhere.
Temple etiquette. A sarong and sash are required to enter any temple, and you should have your own rather than relying on the loan bin. Do not stand higher than a priest. Do not put yourself between someone praying and the shrine they are praying towards. Menstruating women are traditionally asked not to enter — this is stated on signs at most temples and is not negotiable regardless of what you think of it. If a ceremony is in progress and you have not been invited, the correct default is to ask, and the correct response to no is to leave.
Asking. Balinese people are, in general, unusually relaxed about being photographed, which makes it easy to take advantage. The fact that someone does not object is not the same as the fact that they agreed. Learning boleh saya foto? — may I photograph — costs you nothing and changes the nature of the exchange completely.
Agung. The volcano is active. It last erupted seriously in 2017–18 and there is an exclusion zone that expands and contracts with its activity. Check the current status before planning anything on its flanks.
What it is good for
Karangasem is not a good place to build a portfolio of Bali's greatest hits. It is a good place to work on one thing properly over several days — a market, a village, a stretch of coast — because there is enough happening and few enough distractions that repetition becomes possible. Going back to the same place four mornings running is the single most reliable way to make photographs that are not about first impressions, and Karangasem is one of the few parts of Bali where that is still easy to do.