Bali Loosie

Stray color-negative frames from Bali, drifting from roadside silhouettes to garden bins, chewed leaves, and a rope swing in the trees.

Bali, Bali, Indonesia / 35mm color negative (stock unidentified) / Bali Loosie — Bali collection, 35mm film archive

The roll opens looking straight up, where a huge animal-shaped figure — all dark, leafy texture, part lizard, part guardian — lifts its snout into an overcast sky laced with sagging power lines. Palms crowd the bottom edge. It is the kind of roadside apparition Bali produces without warning, and the cables slice right across its face as if the island's wiring never got the memo about reverence.

From there the camera drops to ground level and lingers, twice, on a trio of waste bins: yellow for anorganik, then rust-red, then green, lined up on their metal stand beneath thatched roofs and, in the next frame, dwarfed by a carved stone gateway going soft under moss and ferns on a terraced slope. Centuries of masonry behind, municipal plastic in front — the frames refuse to pick a hero, and that refusal is the joke and the point.

The light turns upward again for a canopy of insect-eaten leaves, backlit into dark lace against a white sky, every hole a small window. Then the closer: a woman on a wooden swing hauled high into the trees beside a tall bamboo pole, sneakers kicked out, grinning mid-arc. After the statues and the bins and the chewed foliage, the roll ends with someone simply airborne.

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Related

Bali / Nature / Temples & Shrines / Markets & Food

  • T-Rex Island - One clifftop afternoon in Bali, from blurred palms to a dinosaur-shaped promontory and the burn of the roll's last light.
  • Bali Street Shots - Roadside Bali on 35mm color negative — signage, stray light, vine-wrapped trees, and a motorbike hauling a cloud of beach balls.
  • Bali Street Shots Two - Street frames from Bali that drift from beach daylight into blurred roads and fluorescent night.
  • Balinese Dance Night Photos - A long-exposure roll of Balinese dance at night, where costume and lamplight dissolve into color.
  • Boat Ride - One roll afloat off Bali — anchored masts, grey horizons, teak decks, and an island seen through mist.
  • Gate - Six frames at a carved split gateway in Bali, where the doorway frames nothing but haze, ocean, and whoever steps into it.
  • Monkey Shrine - Eight frames of 35mm color negative from a Balinese sea temple — dance, cliffs, gates, and the resident monkey.
  • Bali Street - Sidewalk passes and upward glances in Bali, shot close and on the move on 35mm color negative.

Images

Dark silhouette of a large animal-shaped sculpture seen from below against a cloudy sky crossed by many power lines, with palm fronds at the bottom of the frame.
A guardian creature rears into the overcast, and the island's wiring cuts straight across its jaw. Even the monuments here have to share the sky.
Three waste bins — yellow, red, and green — mounted on a metal stand along a paved garden path, with thatched roofs and trees behind them.
Yellow for anorganik, red and green for the rest: a small civic altar under the thatch. Order, politely insisted upon.
Three waste bins in the foreground of a dirt path, with an overgrown carved stone temple gateway on a terraced, plant-covered slope behind them.
The bins hold their line while the old gate goes green behind them. Two kinds of permanence, neither one winning.
Backlit leaves full of insect-eaten holes form dark silhouettes against a bright white sky, with a few reddish leaves and green foliage below.
The insects have been editing. What's left of the canopy reads like dark lace, every hole letting the sky through.
A smiling woman in a white shirt and brown shorts rides a wooden rope swing high among dense trees, next to a tall bamboo pole.
Hauled up into the canopy on rope and a plank of wood, she swings out over the green and grins back at the ground.