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Legacies through the Lens
The story of a lifelong passion for photography, and the people, places and encounters that have shaped a life behind the lens.
At fourteen, Dicky Adiwoso turned the third-floor bathroom of his family home in the Netherlands into a darkroom. More than fifty years later, photography remains a way of looking at the world and holding on to moments that might otherwise disappear.
As the son of an Indonesian diplomat, Dicky spent much of his childhood moving between countries, from Sweden and Egypt to the Netherlands, the United States and Australia, alongside periods in Indonesia. He grew up accustomed to new surroundings, different cultures and unfamiliar faces. Perhaps it was this early exposure to so many places that first shaped his instinct to observe and take notice.
His fascination with photography began in the Netherlands, where he and his brother and sister experimented with black and white film and learned to develop their own photographs in their makeshift bathroom darkroom.
A few years later, while attending high school in the United States, that fascination deepened. On Fridays, Dicky would drive his mother to the National Geographic Museum, where they would spend hours looking at photographs from around the world. The images offered glimpses into places and lives far removed from his own people, landscapes and cultures captured in a single frame.
By sixteen, Dicky was working after school to save for a camera of his own. Eventually, his father who at the time was travelling between Washington and Jakarta, used those savings to buy a Nikon F2 in Tokyo.
What began as a teenage fascination became something much more enduring. Over the years, Dicky's camera has travelled with him throughout Indonesia and around the world, following his changing interests and curiosity. He has photographed many subjects, but people have remained a particular fascination.
For Dicky, the photograph often begins before the camera comes out. He likes to talk with the people he photographs, to understand them and their lives, and to wait for the moment when they reveal a little of themselves. The photograph becomes more than a likeness, it becomes a glimpse of someone and something that might otherwise have gone unseen.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel was restricted and more time was spent at home, Dicky began photographing the birds gathering around the rooftop of his house. What began with pigeons and sparrows developed into a passion for bird photography a very different challenge, but one that demanded the same qualities of attention and patience. The subject could no longer be approached through conversation. Instead, he had to watch, wait and be ready when the moment arrived.
Some of Dicky’s photographs, however, come from a place much closer to home.
As one of the owners of Suak, he has a longstanding connection to this corner of Lampung. His photographs of the surrounding village and landscape capture the everyday scenes beyond the resort, a farmer working the rice paddies with his buffalo, a craftsman absorbed in his work, fishing boats along the coast and the changing light over Suak’s beach.
These photographs are part of a much larger collection, but they have a particular place here. They show Suak not simply as a destination, but as a living place, its people, its traditions, its work and its landscape. They offer a glimpse of the world that surrounds the resort and the everyday life that has always been part of it.
More than fifty years after that first fascination with photography, Dicky is still looking through a lens. The cameras have changed, the subjects have changed and the places he photographs have changed, but the impulse behind it has remained remarkably constant: curiosity.
Perhaps that is what makes photography such a fitting thread through Dicky’s life. It has allowed him to follow that curiosity wherever it leads from distant countries and unfamiliar faces to birds on a rooftop and the village just beyond Suak. Along the way, he has gathered more than photographs. He has gathered fragments of places, encounters and fleeting moments, preserving them long after the moment itself has passed.
And perhaps, in the end, that is what a lifelong passion leaves behind not simply a collection of images, but a way of seeing and a record of the world as it was, seen through one person’s eyes.
