Parting Gift is a visual elegy for kinship under migration, composed as staged 4×5 large-format family tableaux created across Indonesia, rural Oregon, and Chicago. The project brings together the artist’s Indonesian relatives, white rural in-laws, and urban community, placing people shaped by divergent histories into a shared visual space. It reveals how distance, bureaucracy, and culture intervene in how love is lived and sustained. Across weddings, pregnancy, illness, the loss of a newborn child, mourning, and aging, the work treats family not as a stable inheritance but as a practice sustained through presence, care, and the decision to remain in relation.

Central to the project is the understanding that family portraiture is not merely descriptive but generative. The act of staging and making an image together produces a temporary social space in which participants can rehearse forms of coexistence that may be difficult to sustain elsewhere: acceptance, recognition, proximity, or simply the choice to remain present. These photographs do not document family as it already exists. They construct conditions under which family can be renegotiated. Portraiture becomes a method for testing whether connection can persist across difference rather than evidence that harmony has been achieved.

The work moves between celebration and vulnerability, revealing belonging as something sustained through attention during periods of strain as well as joy. Photographing family becomes a form of care, an insistence on witnessing one another across distance, disagreement, and change. The images record not consensus but effort, the labor of remaining in relation that many families undertake without acknowledgment.

Rather than offering a reconciled vision of belonging, Parting Gift proposes family as a practice of endurance, sustained not by harmony but by the ongoing work of remaining bound to one another. It traces tensions between collective obligation and individual autonomy, inherited authority and self-definition, tradition and transformation, asking what forms of love can persist without approval and what relationships survive incompatible moral systems and unequal power. By treating portraiture as a site of encounter rather than affirmation, Suryajaya creates images that hold conflict, tenderness, and ambivalence without forcing resolution. What remains is a proposition: that connection may endure even when belonging is contested and safety cannot be assumed.

This award will support new large-scale tableaux with my Chicago community and rural Oregon in-laws, expanding the work across contexts and culminating in a fully realized photobook of collective portraiture.

Reviewing submissions for this year’s Center Santa Fe Project Development Grant, I kept returning to projects rooted in lived experience that still allowed for play. Many artists engaged the concept of time in personal ways. The aging body, shifting roles within families, and the grief of losing someone close appeared again and again. Other photographers focused on the effects of climate change through flooding and fire-scarred landscapes. A number of artists foregrounded place in their projects, whether approached through portraiture, landscape, or the small details that define a site. Several other image-makers stretched photography into collage, performance, and other hybrid forms. Among the many strong submissions, I was also drawn to projects like Dimitri Stefanov’s After the Fathers and Jinyong Lian’s Trust Me.

Leonard Suryajaya’s series Parting Gift stood apart for its effervescence. It feels alive. Rooted in family, the project contains vibrant, staged scenes that are at once intimate and theatrical. Figures gather within saturated environments brimming with pattern, texture, and color. The sense of collaboration between the artist and those before the camera is undeniable. Even when the work touches on loss, it holds onto a buoyant energy that refuses to be contained.

As a medium, photography can offer a kind of borrowed vision, a way of briefly seeing through someone else’s eyes. In Suryajaya’s Parting Gift, that vision comes through in full technicolor. It is expansive and entirely its own.

— Shana Lopes, PhD • Assistant Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The images are created with the analog 4x5 large format photo process. The exhibition sizes of the images ranges from 24x30, 32x40, 40x50 and 50x62.5 inches on archival Inkjet Print