Jalan Wolter Monginsidi in Kebayoran Baru quietly going about its business on a Sunday evening.
Kebayoran Baru was laid out in the late 1940s as Jakarta’s first planned suburb, which is why it still has trees, roundabouts and streets that go where you expect them to. Wolter Monginsidi runs along one edge of it: two- and three-storey shophouses, a few cafés, the odd building that has been a bank, a restaurant and a phone shop in the space of five years. Sunday evening is the one time the road is quiet enough to stand in.
These are long exposures from the kerb as the light went — the traffic drawn into lines, the shopfronts starting to glow, the sky doing the brief purple thing it does at this latitude before it gives up entirely. A week earlier I had photographed the busway overpass being built over the same street; this is the view from underneath it.
If you go: Kebayoran Baru is the part of Jakarta that is actually pleasant to walk around, and Wolter Monginsidi is a decent spine for it. Blok M is at one end and Senopati’s restaurants are a short walk away. Go on a Sunday. Any other day, the traffic will stand in for the architecture.
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