Karen Strassler

Karen Strassler is Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research has focused on the visual and media culture of Indonesia. Her first book (Refracted Visions, 2010) examined the history of popular photography in Indonesia and its role in the formation of modern national subjects in the postcolonial period. Her second book (Demanding Images, 2020) analyzed the political uses of photography, street art, and other images in the period following the end of dictatorship, a turbulent time of aspiration, reckoning, and fragile democracy. She also writes on the politics of memory and the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia with a focus on the role of visual artists and family photography in excavating buried histories of violence. The recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently working on US-based project examining how people with breast cancer use photography to document and cope with an altered body, and to challenge dominant, sanitized representations of the disease. She continues to write about Indonesia and, across her work, she retains her primary interest in the power of images and practices of image-making.