Friday, September 26, 2025
9:26 PM |
A Generational Divide in Photography
Whenever I ask a much younger friend to take photos of me doing stuff, I get anxious when I get back an avalanche of said photos. I mean, thank you for the generous coverage, from all possible angles, but I’m from a generation where we only got 12 or 24 or 36 shots per roll, and every shot was indeed judiciously considered. There is a curious generational divide between photographers who grew up with manual cameras where we loaded finite rolls of film, and photographers with digital cameras with almost infinite takes. My boyfriend is amazed that when I take photos of things, I do only 1-2 shots, and I'm done.Labels: generations, life, photography
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Thursday, March 21, 2024
7:00 AM |
Dumaguete in 1891.
This is the oldest photograph I’ve ever sourced of Dumaguete. For the sake of transparency, I’ve edited the image a bit to enhance the details, and to make the photo into a square. The real photo is on the Dumaguete Tourism social media. [From the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan]
Labels: dumaguete, history, photography
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Thursday, June 01, 2023
7:00 PM |
Denniz Captures the Dumaguete Night
Among all local street photographers, the best one to capture the Dumaguete nighttime is
Denniz Futalan [ IG: @dennizfutalan7 ]. This is just one of his snapshots; he has others, and it is my dream to curate a show of his night photos one of these days.
Labels: dumaguete, photography
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Tuesday, April 25, 2023
11:33 PM |
Dumaguete Distich, Free E-Book
It's the last week of National Literature Month, so we thought of sharing this e-book of photography and poetry,
Dumaguete Distich, with photos by
Hersley-Ven Casero and
Urich Calumpang, and poetry in couplets by yours truly. Download is free.
Link
here.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, photography, poetry
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Friday, April 21, 2023
1:40 AM |
Girls in the Windows, on a Whim
“Girls in the Windows,” photographed by Ormond Gigli in the summer of 1960 in New York. Made on a whim, made without a commission. Gigli looked out the windows of his studio one morning, and saw the brownstone right outside being readied for demolition. He thought he could use this condemned building for a photo, with girls in bright dresses in every gaping, empty window. He had someone ask the foreman of the demolition crew if he could use the building for an hour, and was told he could do it the next day, during the crew’s lunch time [and to use the foreman’s wife as one of the models]. Gigli made the calls to a modeling agency asking for volunteers, and he arranged the permits as soon as he could. The next day, on the appointed time, he had second thoughts — but the girls were already arriving. He went ahead anyway, directing the photo shoot with a bullhorn. He took 15-18 shots with a 4×5 Speed Graphic. The very next day, the building was demolished. And the photo went on to become an icon.
I love creative things made on a whim.
Labels: art, fashion, history, new york, photography
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Thursday, April 20, 2023
4:17 PM |
Catching Oversized Moments
The extraordinary thing sometimes about art we’ve come to love is to see them with completely fresh eyes. I have always loved Hersley-Ven Casero’s “Catch a Moment” photo series, ever since he started prowling the streets and byways of Dumaguete more than a decade ago to, well, “catch moments” with his camera. I’ve written about his process before, how he'd put himself into specific spots, observing everything in the urban landscape before him, and always waiting for a literal voice floating near his head who prompts him with a simple command: “Now.” And then he’d click. The reality of getting it all in breathtaking composition, honed after years of study and technical know-how, only adds to that magic of obeying an unexplained inner prompt. [My insistence on the use of the word “magic” is deliberate, especially if you know where Hersley comes from.]
In any case, I and many others have enjoyed these gorgeous photos from his walks around town over the years, many of us claiming certain favorites. His sepia photo of a Dumaguete street complete with a tricycle, with the morning glimmer of the Rizal Boulevard in the distance, is mine. This shot of children playing with wheels and running through a smoke-drenched road is another. [Come to think of it, I do have a thing for sepia!]
And now to see the latter in a way I’ve never seen it before: in glorious, gigantic reproduction, 41.33 x 61.41 inches in size, and printed with pigmented ink on smooth cotton rag! The result is an immersive experience with the photos, as if privileged with stepping into the reality they offer. I have always wanted to have a photo exhibit like this in Dumaguete, but have always felt it would remain a dream: no Dumaguete printer is capable of printing photos in this size, and if there are any, the cost would probably be prohibitive. Now that it has come true with this exhibit, Onion Kids: Homecoming, in MUGNA Gallery, it feels like a dream fulfilled.
And what a dream! Because I’m seeing this photo with details I have missed before: the density of the smoke, the griminess of the dirt, the prints on the children’s shirts, the fullness of the shadows, the texture of the foliage. And the joy that bounces off the kinetic energy of the children becomes more magnified. Hersley’s photos have always had that ingredient of joy. You can never find a note of dourness in them. In his photos, people fly into the sea, swim beds of onions, chase balloons, chase each other. [Heck, one of his iconic photos, which has traveled the world over and has become a meme, is that of a laughing kid!] I think people respond to that joy instinctively, which has made Hersley perhaps the most appreciated Dumaguete visual artist of his generation today.
The exhibit runs until 7 May 2023.Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, photography
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Sunday, October 16, 2022
5:56 PM |
Let's Get Lost
Bruce Weber’s Let's Get Lost [1988], his searing look into the life and music of jazz legend Chet Baker, is the saddest, the most beautiful documentary I’ve seen on a musician. The black and white photography is gorgeous — you can’t expect anything less from the director who's also a famously brilliant. The music is evocative and gets under your skin — a jazz soundtrack to die for. [I kept playing “Imagination” on the OST on repeat because it was just astonishing.] And the subject himself oozes with talent, charisma, and mystery — you can’t help but fall hard for this beautiful asshole of a genius. This film has been on my queue list for months. Why did I wait?Labels: documentaries, film, jazz, music, photography
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Wednesday, July 28, 2021
9:53 PM |
I Feel Your Pain, ‘Te.
Photo by Eloisa Lopez for ReutersLabels: journalism, photography, politics
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Tuesday, February 09, 2021
5:09 PM |
My Dumaguete State of Mind
Captured by Denniz Futalan.
Labels: coronavirus, dumaguete, life, photography
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Friday, August 19, 2016
1:00 PM |
Still Memories, in Ten Shots
“Photography is the only ‘language’ understood in all parts of the world, and bridging all nations and cultures, it links the family of man. Independent of political influence—where people are free—it reflects truthfully life and events, allows us to share in the hopes and despair of others, and illuminates political and social conditions. We become the eye-witnesses of the humanity and inhumanity of mankind…”
~ HELMUT GERNSHEIM, Creative Photography (1962)
“The camera is my tool. Through it I give reason to everything around me.”
~ ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ
I.
Sometimes I still catch myself looking at life through an imaginary lens, to see how a particular world—or an experience—looks like as a snapshot. In a life that thrives on the ubiquity of images, perhaps doing that is not so strange anymore.
We have come to accept pictures—photographs—as something that is almost an extension of human existence. They mark us as having lived, as having been through verifiable experience. And life, as it is, has been profoundly changed by photography as well. The very expression “Kodak moments” defines this influence of photography on our existence. In the frail biology of our memories thus, photographs have become the lasting reminders of everything.
My first encounter with photography was an accident of almost primal surprise, of discovery. The camera for a very long time held no interest for me: I saw it only as a boxy contraption with complex buttons and pins and revolving dials. It was the very paradigm of technological difficulty, especially for someone like me who was not particularly drawn to gizmos or to anything remotely technical. An Instamatic model, with its auto-focus function and point-and-click ease, was enough to sustain a need for documenting moments from my life on the go. Other than that, there was no need really—or so I thought—to take photography very seriously.
But one weekend, a friend—a burly bohemian named Krevo—had brought along his Lyca camera while we traversed the hilly town of Valencia, right near the edges of Cuernos de Negros, on foot.
It was a beautiful day, some time in the summer of 1995. I was younger then, still in college, and thought earnestly of myself as an “artist” seeking a medium to break into, and waiting for some spark of creative drive. I had already spurned painting, and was starting to dabble in writing. Yet for a very long time, inspiration proved elusive.
That day in the hills, there were only the mountains, clouds, trees, flowers, and the occasional passersby to consider in our little trek. Krevo was happily snapping at everything with the gusto of a little boy with a prized toy.
In the midst of his snapping frenzy, he stopped and—putting down carefully his Lyca against his chest, its strap carefully laced loosely around his neck—he told me: “I’ve always loved seeing the world through the lens of my camera.” He went on to say that it offered me something else that one could not readily see with the naked eye. That simple declaration struck a chord in me.
Krevo motioned for me to come nearer, and when I did, he handed over his camera which was already ready for the clicking. “This is what you turn to focus, and this is what you turn to zoom in or out,” he said, carefully pointing out the dials I’d need.
“Now,” he said, “take a shot of that frog on the rock.”
With some hesitation, I cradled the camera with my hands, and squinting, looked through the viewfinder.
There it was: a frog within a world all its own—framed, isolated, angled—the sole focus of my photographic intentions. It surprised me that this image cropped from a larger, unbounded reality was more interesting to consider and ponder over just because I had blocked away the rest of the world by my focusing on this image that mattered to me at the moment.
Photographs, I realized, was an instrument of focus, blocking away the visual noise of everything else.
All pictures have a self-contained story, captured by the four sides of the camera’s viewfinder. Photography is a different grammar of seeing the world.
Snapshots, in other words, are witnesses to living. They galvanize moments to a kind of immediacy that even when each photo has faded to an overwash of time and sepia, they still seem to be always in the present tense.
II.
HERE’S THIS one snapshot, for example, of deep, excruciating pain: my friend Donnie’s photograph of me one quick afternoon, in a government office—after the discovery of the sadness of wooden floors and gravity.
That day, I had carelessly slipped on the strap of my Canon T70 camera over my right shoulder, as if it was an ordinary slingbag. I was on the way to the city mayor’s office. One wrong turn, and I found my camera clattering down to the floor with a few fatal bumps, each thudding sound a tightening vise-grip around my heart.
I remember holding my breath. Like an instance of death, my life with my camera flashed before my eyes in cinematic sensurround, quick but brutal, and comprehensive: I remembered, all too quickly and briefly, many honeymoons with my camera, clicking at this and that. How many moons and mountains and people had I captured with those lenses? Too many images to count and catalogue, and so much scrapbook fodder: smiling faces, contemplative looks, silly poses, erotic montages, and off-guard indiscretions, all caught by my camera’s sheer truth, each click a slice of life, a captured detail the way we could not capture real moments and put them in a jar.
That tragic afternoon, I stayed frozen for a moment or so, and then soon the panic began. What happened? Will my camera still work? Have I damaged it beyond repair? Can I afford another camera?
Donnie’s picture of me that afternoon is a caricature of shock.
After clicking, he shook his head in mute but shared commiseration: “Remember to always place your strap around your neck,” he told me.
I learned this: one could never know the value of something until it disappeared from sight—like a fragile print of a lover’s face on untreated photographic paper, dissolving into chemical blackness if bright light accidentally stole into the red-tinted cocoon of the dark room.
This was several years ago. No photography for me since then. But I missed my camera. I missed most the stories it told.
III.
HERE’S ANOTHER SNAPSHOT.
A picture of Mother after the accident. (Months earlier, she had slipped across the kitchen’s tiled floor which was wet with soapsuds from an overflowing washing machine. She had not noticed the danger; her mind was preoccupied with the romances and indiscretions of her latest Sidney Sheldon heroine. Slipping, she broke and fractured her shoulder bone, and went through three months of intensive physical therapy.) I took it one afternoon sometime after that unfortunate fall. She had fallen asleep for siesta, but the quiet of our old neighborhood in Villarosa was too seductive for me to resist making a pictorial document. I had four more shots left of my black-and-white film—the rest of the roll being a pictorial essay I had taken of an early morning tabô in Dumaguete.
One called these extra exposures “waste shots”—which are unplanned shots taken just to finish the roll and to set the camera’s rewind mechanism running. I decided that the sooner I could finish the roll, the sooner I could get my photos back from the print shop, and the sooner I could breathe easy and see how the pictures turned out.
So I woke Mother up from her nap. “What is it?” she asked, still sleepy.
“I need you to pose for me, for a while, outside the house,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. (Mother was always game to my shenanigans. I was, after all, her youngest son.)
I set her small, brown frame to contrast against our house’s whitewashed outside walls, with only a French light post and our front door’s arch to provide accents to the plain architectural texture. I snapped the picture, and I clicked the lock.
That was it. A waste shot, nothing else.
The rewind button whirred.
But that “waste shot” turned out to be the most beautiful and dramatic shot in the roll.
The photo I took was of a woman in sepia—done with a tinge of brown, endearing and classic in its vocabulary of hue and meaning. Mother in that picture looks up the sky as if in search for meaning in the middle of an afternoon. There is a play of light on her cheeks, which makes her look more vulnerable, too human.
I realized then that photography was a kind of instinct. It was an epiphany captured on magic paper. It was fleeting beauty seized by chance, the way one saw God suddenly in the pictorial details of a flower blooming.
IV.
THIS ONE IS A SERIES OF PICTURES, taken by my brother Edwin, of a New Year’s Eve celebration. We are having dinner with Uncle James. There’s also a salsa-dancing bartender gyrating to a wild Latin beat. The pictures, too, show me on my second glass of white wine, my own digital camera in my hands. All of us are toeing the invisible line between past and future years, wondering what it will be like, this New Year that is suddenly facing us, with gyrating bartender and all.
The photos also show me in a contemplative mood: I am thinking that it is difficult to have deep thoughts about time in the middle of a cacophony of gunpowder exploding, shrill horns tooting, cars blaring, and what suspiciously sound like empty kitchen skillets being pounded against the wall—so much noise gathering up towards the stroke of midnight. We are in CocoAmigos Restaurant. Uncle James sits beside me and looks at me with a hint of concern. “The noise…it’s an ancient Chinese custom,” I remember him telling me, smiling, “and the noise is supposed to drive off all the evil spirits of the previous year.”
“Yes,” I remember replying, “but we did the same thing last year, and it never quite worked. It’s been, on the whole, a bad year for everybody.”
Uncle James laughs a while later. “Sometimes we do certain things because of the comfort the routine gives us, like an old blanket,” he says.
I, too, have snapped hundreds of photos with my camera as a curious habit of seeking comfort. Perhaps I feel the world is a much better place when seen through the camera’s lens, with everything captured in a wide-angle perspective, everything boxed and rational, everything clickable and storable like a cache for memory kept in a box. Or a tattered album.
But what the pictures did not show was how things in the restaurant were becoming much too noisy for comfort, compounded by the shrill sounds of plastic horns some of the customers are tooting. From some distance, unseen, the fireworks pulled at my cynical heart with their bright streams of red, blue, and yellow flowering briefly against the dark of the sky. I looked pensive in the photo.
I realized then that fireworks, like photography, might make men smile, but their pleasures were often too brief, too expensive.
What happens between the moments of explosion, of picture-taking, between the collective ohhs and ahhs or “Say cheese!”, and then the quick disintegration of light into the surrounding blackness? There is a rising of spirits, briefly, and then the rush to nothingness: the feeling of emptiness after the orgasm.
I remember us taking more photographs of people dancing. Also photographs of the white wine and the food. Of my brother Edwin and Uncle James in the table with me. Of the bartender gyrating some more.
Each photograph becomes an accounting of things past—and a resolution for things in the future. Each click is an invitation to a quick parade of questions about life and nothingness.
The next day, I plug the camera into my computer to download the jpeg files, but everything is blurry, like life itself.
V.
THIS GRAINY SHOT WAS TAKEN in Manila with a Nokia cellphone camera sometime in 2003. Nobody believed me when I texted from the MRT halfway near Quezon Ave., on the way to Shangri-La Plaza, that the celebrity/model Marc Nelson was sitting across from me. There was an ocean between our distance of about a meterstick, and for a moment there was sudden clarity to clichés.
So near, so far.
My thumb fumbled quickly with my cellphone keys. (Everybody becomes a champion texter when the need arises.)
“Marc Nelson? In an MRT?” Tessa texted back from her condominium in Makati, her incredulity as ashen-white as the backlight of her Nokia phone. From Dumaguete, Gerard texted back as well, his message equally doubtful—accusations hanging in the air like knives for liars: “Naks, I don’t believe you. You’re like Joey.” (Our friend Joey has a famous story about being very close friends with the singer Regine Velasquez. We all smile when he tells the tale: “How wonderful for you,” we all say in patronizing tones, conspirational smiles etched on each one of our faces.)
Unlike Pinocchio, however, my nose did not grow long. “Jesus Christ, nobody believes me,” I whispered to Eric, who was sitting beside me to my left, his eyes equally giddy with concealed star-struck glee. We both tried to avert our eyes, with difficulty. I peeked from my pretend nonchalance, but still careful not to gawk. I took in the man, the celebrity in cognito: he wore a blue baseball cap which carefully obscured his eyes in shades; also a dark blue muscle shirt immaculately and stylishly untucked from his faded blue jeans—all sartorial ensemble dotted by metallic-blue sneakers. He had a gray knapsack mixed with shades of blue—and there were those trademark biceps, all too familiar now from their having graced too many magazine pages and TV shows.
It is the man, I told myself, unbelieving friends be damned.
Marc Nelson was Dressed All in Blue. Like all creations of the small screen, he appeared surprisingly smaller, and leaner than in our imaginations.
Save for Eric and I, nobody else in the MRT noticed the celebrity in our midst—people in Manila, I quickly thought, have perfected the typical metropolitan blindness to other people, a syndrome one develops as a protective bubble from brushing against too much humanity in one’s traffic-laden ordinary day. No one really looks at anyone, and all places around are empty and vacant in one’s eyes, in a metropolis otherwise teeming with three million people.
But Eric and I were not regular city folks; we were both promdis newly landed in the great metropolis, and our eyes were still forever searching and observing, hungry for the sight of new things. My skin breathed in the unfamiliar, the strangeness, the bigness of it all. In Manila, I whispered a prayer of contentment, of suddenly finding myself without the constant view of my little Visayan city’s boulevard, its small streets, Scooby’s, Silliman Avenue Café. All things Dumaguete and blah. Manila was a stranger’s home, a welcome foulness in place of small city pristineness.
“I read once in MEGA magazine,” Eric whispered, “that Marc often takes the MRT on the way to ABS-CBN.”
“And now we’re in the same train car with him!” I whispered back.
We quickly dismissed plans of asking for autographs. We are not jologs, we told ourselves.
Marc Nelson held a Tagalog paperback romance. I raised my eyebrows. Tacky, I thought, but the book managed to hide his head effectively. His anonymity became a shield.
I couldn’t stand any more of the suspense.
Then I remembered that my phone had a built-in camera. I clicked furtively at Marc Nelson while pretending to text. Hastily, I sent the picture to unbelieving friends to confirm my Truth.
Pictures, I realized, had that magnificent power to reinforce the sense of what was truthful and real, perhaps even more than words could.
On the middle of the MRT ride to Shangri-La, I decided it was a perfect day.
VI.
HERE’S ANOTHER PHOTO, of an old friend’s obscured face, in sepia, showing only three-quarters of his whole visage: one can only sees his eyes, ears, curly hair, Gaelic nose in blurry details.
But to blur is often not a mistake in photos. To blur lends meaning to one’s subject—the way one intends to convey a certain fastness, or a certain unreality.
This is how I remember my friend Quddus: as a dream in my head. Quddus has gone far and away—I do not know where he is at the moment. Is he in Miami looking at the stars? In Palawan finding the perfect beach?
He was the one who taught me how to cradle a camera like one would a woman, or a comfortable lover: to place between the loving spaces of palms and fingers something sacred, the camera’s bottom placed squarely on top of one’s left upturned palm, with left fingers turning the lens like one would touch a lover’s skin, while one’s right hand secures the right side of the camera, with right pointer finger gently pressing the click button.
To photograph is to make love with the contraption, and with the image in the viewfinder.
In college, I took pictures of frogs, of cats, of flowers, of people rushing about in an existence of motorcycles, restaurants, and parties. Quddus was the technical one in our duo: he devoured photography books and knew the technical nuances of backlight, shutter speed, apertures (f/16, f/32, f/27…), exposure compensation, filters, peak sensitivity. He knew well the photography dark room and its procedures like the back of his hand: the steps in the intricate wounding of unexposed negative round the roller, the careful exposure of light and negative onto sensitive photographic paper, the right amounts of fixing and washing solutions.
I, on the other hand, had the creative “eye”: the language of images.
Once, Quddus kept vigil outside Silliman Church one night. He had his camera on a tripod, and on a timer. For the whole night, he kept his camera and one shot open to the night sky. By morning, he had his shot printed.
And there it was on print: a bright geography of stars moving across the photographic paper—streaks of mesmerizing light the way you can never see stars with your naked eye.
I knew at once why I took pictures: it was for revealing moments like this, to be able to see stars as fireflies dancing in the dark.
VII.
HERE’S ONE PICTURE my photographer friend Donnie took some years ago, and gave to me—framed—as a birthday gift.
Donnie likes taking pictures of people. Portraits. When I see him around town, he is always sporting hair like Jesus Christ’s, and wears his constant backpack. Inside it, there is always a camera. He likes taking “fashion pictures,” he says—and he doesn’t know why: his portfolio is littered with beautiful women (and men) in exotic locations, on the beach, in some café, in private verandas, in gardens, in the private darkness of bedrooms.
This time, however, he gives me a picture of two country men passing through rural landscape, each astride mobile means which are perfect opposites of each other: one man is on a cow, another man is on a bike. I like the paradox of the subject matter: it is poetry at work, drenched in irony.
See how young the cow rider is? A boy in puberty. And the bicycle rider? An older man with an abundance of wrinkles. A portrait of generations passing and continuing, and contrasting, and evolving. Old and new as they are, and old being new, and new being old—elements of post-modernism contained in a panorama such as this.
See how the color complements the subject? The blue of the sky bleeds into the deep yellow of the cornfield in the background, and of the brownish skin of the men and the cow. A swath of pastoral colors—the photo borders on the magic of oil paintings.
And here’s my other photographer friend Razceljan’s photo of Siquijor in the twilight. Skies red, and the beach blue and empty in the low tide—only the stumps of occasional mangrove indicate any presence of life. He took this photo while we—all three of us—were on vacation during Holy Week, the day Rico Yan died.
I remember there was only a pervasive silence that day—a quiet beach, a quiet day. Each of us—Donnie, Razcel, and I—were armed with our vacation books and probing cameras. We all whiled away the Siquijodnon afternoons chasing after surf, and chasing after images. Siquijor was magical that week. Razcel perhaps best captured that magic in his photo: a place tinged with blood red, presupposing a psychology of place and witchcraft.
VIII.
SOMETIMES, THOUGH, too much of our lives happen quickly, and passions are often set aside, often for years. Accidents claim your stake. Or sometimes you just lose focus.
I have said I haven’t done photography for a number of years now. Such a long separation from the photographic bent can make rusty one’s sense of photographic proportion, frame, and vision. Always, and everyday, I ask myself, Do I still have the ‘eye’?
Because once smitten with the artistic possibilities of the camera—both still and moving—one cannot help but continually appreciate the photographic possibilities of the world all around us. My bible in better days was Susan Sontag’s seminal book On Photography, which was in many ways a condemnation of photography as moral influence, but which also made the singular claim of photography as an art form that mattered.
Sontag wrote in that book: “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images…. To collect photographs is to collect the world.”
When you’re young, the thing to do is just that: to collect a world of sensation and experiences. Photography thus was, for me, the perfect escape into that occupation. I also made a short film in those days titled “Trahedya sa Kabila ng Liwanag,” which was done in collaboration with a bunch of friends for several courses in filmmaking in Silliman University’s School of Communication. It was an experience which distilled all that I knew from all those years studying the shots and mise en scene of Hitchcock and Ozu and Welles. But I never did another film again after that.
Still photography, however, was a bug that bit me harder than moving pictures. The love for it grew when I was editor-in-chief of Silliman’s student paper, when I was often driven to madness with what I considered the lazy ineptness of my staff photographers. “Photography is more than just capturing a moment in time,” I used to tell them in-between the pressing deadlines, “it must also be a story, a narrative.” Give me an angle that frames the story better, I’d tell them. And when they couldn’t deliver, I’d take the camera and do the snapping myself.
But something has struck me anew in the light of current trends: photographic film as we know it is dead. Everybody has gone digital, and even for those who can’t afford the new digital cameras, they have their camera phones now handy to take a shot at anything, and everything. This is a testament to the prescience of Robert Frank, who once, perhaps wearily, claimed, “You can photography anything now.”
Those who can’t afford cellphones with cameras instead go to Internet cafes where they pose, often without shame, in front of webcameras all too ready for posing, then posting and emailing the photographic evidence of themselves for the rest of the cyber world to see.
When the idea of such photographic democracy was still in its infancy, the possibilities promised all the bright things. Imagine! we told ourselves, we could be on top of a mountain, or in front of a waterfall, and we would be able to take photos of ourselves—with our phones!
It took a year or two for all of us to also find out cellphone camera culture was not all roses. It also brought out the inner porno star in all of us. Who would not be amazed by the sheer amount of personal porn coming out of the woodwork these days as new gizmos increasingly become more affordable and readily available in the market? All sorts of sex scandals—known mostly by their places of misdeeds, from Dumaguete to Bacolod, and from Mindoro to Cebu—have been passed on from cellphone to cellphone through MMS and regurgitated by the VCD pirates in our midst. Who hasn’t seen the TV midgets Mahal or Mura doing their striptease? Or the comedian Terry Aunor urinating? Or the TV personality Ethel Booba playing with herself with her boyfriend behind the camera? Or the news reporter JV Villar baring everything for his Bluetooth phone camera to record? Or the model Cedric Carreon letting his body be gazed from head to foot? Or the actor Troy Montero “playing around” with some of his buddies? And now, an alleged buggering of the actor Piolo Pascual? Forget Reality TV. The real thing -- sleazier, but more exciting because more real -- is going on beneath our noses. It’s like everybody has become their own porn star—the ultimate penance for the ubiquity of image-making, in a culture drowning in it.
I doubt anyone can say camera phones are evil. But camera phones have indeed awakened “something” in many of us, and we can piece the puzzle as thus: there is now the ease of recordability in the modern age, revealing to us the illusory promise of privacy, the universal and perverted wish to “perform,” the subtle pornographic influence of pop culture, with all moves learned from Deep Throat onwards to Playboy Videos, and to the gyrations of the Viva Hot Babes (and Men) all for a buck or two on DVD.
Images can be deadly.
IX.
BUT IMAGES CAN also be inspiring. I remember it was the renowned photographer Eduardo Masferré who finally cemented my love affair with photography. In particular, it was his famous photograph of a beautiful, young Kalinga woman which first made me pause, and which made me first consider the politics and aesthetics of image-making.
In Masferré’s picture, the Kalinga girl is bare-chested, a necklace adorning her throat. Her arms are covered with tattoos, and a cigarette hangs down a smiling mouth. Her eyes are alive.
Seeing that for the first time, I was instantly smitten with the possibilities of photography as something that familiarized what was for me alien, but also something beautiful. It was the first time I knew for sure that photography had something to say.
My first encounter with Masferré began with rumination, edging on studious devotion, over his picture book, People of the Philippine Cordillera. I had accidentally stumbled upon it in the library while researching for a theme in my political science class. As I slowly fingered through every page, every Masferré photograph seemed to drip with quiet importance, each declaring itself to be a masterpiece of the late Father of Philippine Photography, as he was often called. I felt myself wishing I had taken those photographs. I wished I had his “eye.”
It was not only that the photographs he took—no matter the subject—were beautiful, but that they also aimed to teach us about the ways of a forgotten people—an advocacy not always to be found in art. As Jill Gale de la Villa once wrote, “Eduardo Masferré’s legacy is irreplaceable. To read about the mountain people’s culture is one thing. To really feel that culture one needs to see Masferré’s photographs. He has left a body of work that will show the ancestral life and ways of the people of the Central Cordillera, so that we may visualize how the Cordillera forebears lived and worked, painstakingly carving vast areas of rice terraces into steep mountainsides, using rudimentary tools to fit billions of rocks neatly together to make thousands of kilometers of walls; know that they discovered and used highly advanced principles of hydraulics to accomplish the job; realize that they had intricate cultures that provided appropriate activities for all stages of life, from prebirth to beyond the transition to the next world.”
I knew the biography of the master well. Masferré had exhibits of his photographs virtually everywhere—Manila in 1982, Copenhagen in 1984, and Tokyo in 1986. In 1989, he became the only Filipino to be given the honor of having his work exhibited at the prestigious Les Rencontres Internationale de la Photographie in Arles, France. Later, in 1990, some 120 of his prints were purchased by the Smithsonian Institution for a six-month exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
In my thoughts, I had sworn that someday, I would meet the man who created a statement of beauty from a simple snapshot.
A journey to the mountain would be that chance.
I remember Friday, the 24th of March, 1995, quite well. It was the beginning of summer. School had ended for the term, and there was that sudden sweet acknowledgment of freedom from all that academic wrangling. It took some planning and a little strategy to decide what to do and how to spend my upcoming days under the sweltering summer sun. A trip to Luzon, I finally decided. To Sagada. And so it was. My boat ticket for Manila was dated March 25, a Saturday. I was to leave at 10 o’clock the next morning.
With Satuday came sudden spring as I started on my journey to the mountains. The boat was late. Above the chaos and the sweat, people hustled to get on the vessel that would take us far north to a place I’d never been to. Finally, amidst the noise of the throng of loud porters, Dumaguete seemed suddenly so far away. Through my camera’s lens, Dumaguete’s shores was a panorama of goodbye to what was, for me, familiar. But the unfamiliar north beckoned, and I had my camera in hand.
Several days later, and on that mountain in Sagada, I finally saw Masferré’s pink house. It was quiet. And then I knocked on the door.
“Would you like to meet my husband?” the Manang who opened the door asked me as I stood in the living room of the pink house. The place was small, but there was certain coziness to the house: it felt warm and uncannily familiar. Here and there, black and white prints hung on every wall, like testaments to an artist’s greatness. I stood mute before the mounted pictures of people of the mountains, the Kalingas. The pictures were expressive, and often playful in their depiction of simple lives. There was a man clad in a bahag looks forlornly over his village from atop a hill as the sun sets behind the mountains beyond. There were toothless women smiling, clad in intricately woven clothing, stripped in the festal colors of their tribes. There was an old pensive man sitting in his dap-ay. There were frenzied dancing, and complex rituals before the backdrop of sweeping rice terraces.
The Manang repeated her question. I quickly nodded in answer. She smiled, and then left the room. The realization that I was to meet the man—the legend I have heard about for so long, and read about so much—finally hit me. I prepared to document the moment with a ready camera.
I waited for him. I wandered through the house. In one room, I saw how the great photographer had fashioned his own natural light source in one huge space of a “dark room.” The light was from the ceiling, where the sunlight could pass through a well-fashioned box. The rays went straight to the developing table, and I could see what his intentions were: to be able to make large prints of his photographs. It was ingenious.
Then I heard some noise, and Manang was back, pushing a man in a wheelchair. It was Masferré. He did not talk. He could not walk. He was, to my silent and surprising dismay, somehow wasting away in old age. But I could see there was still life and genius in those old eyes.
“You can shake his hand,” Manang told me. “But he has to rest soon.”
I went to him, and shook his hand. “It is a great honor, sir, to have finally met you,” I said, with a catch in my throat. Did he nod? I was not sure, but I was happy to meet the man.
“Do you want me to take a photo of you together?” Manang asked me. “I see you have a camera with you.”
I thought about it quickly. And then I shook my head, No.
After coffee, I bade them farewell, and went home.
X.
It is best to take photographs in the “magic hours” of the day: very early in the morning, or at sunset—at that precise time when the sun is horizontal in the east, or in the west.
The light then becomes parallel to the ground, and there are no downcast shadows to overwhelm the subject in front of your camera. Natural lighting becomes perfect, and the sun’s light becomes more diffused in the atmosphere, perfect for pictures that come out more ethereal, more… “magical.”
But “magic hours” are too short. Soon, noon and slanting sunlight threaten, or night’s darkness looms—and you have to fold your tripods and put away your cameras in your bags, and you have to wait for the next magic session to begin, or for the next photogenic image to unfold in your sight, ready for the clicking.
I miss Masferré’s genius. And I miss my Canon T70 camera. It still lies crippled in my camera bag, perhaps ruing the day it met the reality of wooden floors and gravity.
I have realized that even photography has its sense of mortality—like life, like an old picture curling to gray as time moves on, and even memory becomes a memory of itself, like a snapshot suddenly turned dark, turned to a nothingness.
Labels: life, photography
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Monday, June 27, 2016
7:25 PM |
The War Isn't Over
Last year, photographer
Ed Freeman landed himself in hot water over a photograph he took ten years prior. That photograph, commissioned in 2005 for a cover in
Frontiers, a gay magazine, did not stir controversy when it was initially published. The magazine had a small circulation, and its readers were people who could very well "read" into the image's intentions. It was also a very beautiful photograph: it featured four muscled young men of various ethnicities, some half-naked, all trying to hoist a gay pride flag -- that rainbow-themed symbol of LGBTs everywhere.
For anyone who knows history, the image is every bit a recreation of a famous older photograph, one taken on 23 February 1945 by Associated Press photographer
Joe Rosenthal who snapped a picture of five American marines trying to hoist the American flag in the heat of battle in Iwo Jima during World War II. It was a powerful image even then, a galvanising one that led the U.S. to use it for propaganda purposes (Clint Eastwood's
Flags of Our Fathers is a mannered account of that piece of history), and it won Rosenthal the Pulitzer Prize.
Since then, Rosenthal's photo has taken on a kind of sacred iconography -- meaning to say it touches the raw nerves of people who see it being repurposed for something else. Over the years, such sensitivity has erupted to small brawls of words. For example:
Time Magazine, for a global warming issue in 2008, was criticized for publishing a cover in which the American flag was replaced with a tree.
But when the
Frontiers cover came out in 2005, nobody said anything.
And it was likely because it was a time in our lives where most people were "pre-internet." The web was already around at that time, but social media -- and its predisposition to sharing -- had yet to take root. (Facebook was founded in 2004, but it would only start gaining global reach in 2008.)
In 2015, in celebration of the U.S. Supreme Court's unprecedented ruling on same-sex marriage, LGBT everywhere rejoiced by sharing a lot of things in the name of "victory" -- and this time around, Ed Freeman's ten-year-old image was whisked from the shadows of the past and into the maelstrom of things in the Instagrammable present. The picture above was shared everywhere and by everyone --
and only then did the backlash begin for Ed Freeman, and with that even some death threats.
I try to make myself understand the anger and incredulity of these folks and their insistence of keeping "pure" an iconic image. After all, it is a real image: some of those men hoisting the flag died soon after in the war. It is symbolic of real-life sacrifice, and real-life shedding of blood. I understood their pain, even if I did not quite get their anger and its underlying homophobia.
But a year hence, and so soon after Orlando, I find the image by Freeman even more appropriate to use. Because the LGBT, truth to tell, has been in a protracted war, too -- this one being fought for decades and decades, even longer than World War II. And many foot soldiers have died, have lost family, have been lobotomised, have been fired from their jobs, have been ostracised, have suffered diseased because of negligent homophobic institutions, all in the fight for equal rights. The latest victims are the 49 in Orlando whose only sin was that they wanted to be in a place where they could express their authentic selves truly. They died for that, because a gun man believed they didn't deserve that right, or that wish.
We are fighting a war.
Homophobia is our Iwo Jima. And we have all the right to hoist our rainbow flag in the big battlefield of this long horrible cultural war.
[
Read Ed Freeman's story over at The Washington Post.]
#PrideMonth2016
Labels: homophobia, issues, photography, queer, war, world war II
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Friday, June 24, 2016
11:05 PM |
The Questions We Are Asked
I was asked the question again this week when I was at a wake; I had come in the morning to avoid the usual night crowd of people in vigil. An elderly aunt of the friend who died sized me up in all my bearings of grief, and then pointedly asked, out of the blue: "So when are you getting married?"
Lola, I wanted to say,
I don't even know you. And then she suggested that perhaps I should return that evening, in the hopes that I'd meet a girl and I'd become a catch. I'm 40, I was with my boyfriend, and still this type of questions throw me. What do you say to that, given the intricate negotiations of what is acceptable in "polite" Filipino society?
Lola, I can't marry. My kind of marriage is not legal in the Philippines. Lola, I'll marry when they come up with unicorns. Lola, I'm gay -- don't you see that? None works without upsetting the lola -- and in wakes, you tend to avoid unnecessary confrontation. Alas, I don't have the quick and witty repartees of my friend Patrick who typically answers this question with: "I'll get married
kung mahuman ug bursa sa akong gown [... when the beading of my bridal gown is finished]." Another friend could be morbid in his usual reply: "I'll marry when you're dead,
lola." I have no capacity for winking answers, nor the stomach for wishing the inquisitor dead. But it does serve to illustrate the landmines gay men and women have to negotiate with as friends and family come to terms with their sexuality, and ignorant of everything else about it, can ask the silliest and stupidest of questions. Which is why when the Center for Women's Studies of the University of the Philippines came out with a "picture book" titled
Anong Pangalan Mo sa Gabi? at Iba Pang Tanong sa mga LGBT in 2013 (through project coordinator Eric Julian Manalastas, and edited by Tetay Mendoza and Joel Acebuche), it seemed rainbow-sent.
Here is a book that deftly combines photography and sociology. As a photographic project, reminiscent of
Humans of New York, it does the service of visualising for the uninitiated the variety of looks of people who identify as gay or lesbian or queer (
because, hey, we all don't look the same), and Rod Singh's black and white photographs are powerfully staged even when naturalistic: he makes stark profiles of people captured in ordinary time, which lends the whole thing an unmistakable humanity, as it should. Each one, of course, holds up a small blackboard on which is written, in chalk, questions of all sorts that the LGBT have learned to answer, or to dodge, or to take as mirrors for how our society perceives gay lives to be all about. The book tries to dissect these questions, of course, but the general take I have is that these are questions coming straight from shadowy shells of heteronormative ignorance and sometimes pure homophobia. But alas they do get asked of us. And the book tries to spin for funny answers -- and does so with such aplomb -- but eventually it does its job, too, of seriously taking apart the questions and giving an honest accounting of gay lives. Says Center for Women's Studies Director Dr. Sylvia Estrada Claudio of the project: "Sa sampling mga tanong at sampling mga sagot na nilalaman ng aklat na ito, madaling mauunawaan ng mambabasa ang pang-araw-araw na panglalait at diskriminasyong dinadaanan ng mga LGBT sa Pilipinas. Pasensyosong sinasagot ang mga tanong, na kahit walang masamang intention, ay masakit sa damdamin. Makikita ang dignidad, pagkatao, at paging tao ng nga LGBT sa mga sagot -- maging seryoso, nagpapatawa or pasaway man. Hindi makatao ang mga tanong, hindi makatao ang diskriminasyon laban sa mga LGBT. Salungat sa kabihasnan at culturing Pilipino ang mating di-makatao."
So for the title question -- "Anong pangalan mo sa gabi?" -- the book answers: "Bata pa lang ako tinatanong na ako dito. Hanggang dito ba naman? Kapag bakla ang isang tao, inaasahan ng iba na automatic na babae ang presentasyon nya sa kanyang sarili. Ang Rod sa umaga ay nagiging Rhoda sa gabi. Ang Karding sa umaga ay Carrie Bradshaw sa gabi. Puno nga yata ang mundo ng mga simplistic dichotomies: Lalake o Babae. Umaga o Gabi. Pagtanggap o Pangungutya."
There are other questions, such as...
... and it is the singular enjoyment of the book to peruse the answers offered, to laugh at the humour of the replies, but also to think hard afterwards about the things we eventually learn when facts come with the answers and they serve to shed light on the discrimination these questions imply.
For a copy of the book, please contact the UP Center for Women's Studies, Magsaysay Ave. cor. Ylanan Road, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City 1101.
#PrideMonth2016
Labels: books, issues, life, photography, queer
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Thursday, June 16, 2016
2:37 PM |
Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and All the Pictures to Look At [NSFW]
This is
Robert Mapplethorpe's
Man in Polyester Suit, a 1980 photo of Milton Moore, the artist's then lover, wearing a three-piece suit with his penis blatantly exposed. It made history for commanding $478,000 at an auction in Sotheby's New York. It is a controversial photographic work for some -- but it doesn't even come close to the rest of Mapplethorpe's body of work, a posthumous exhibition of which prompted Republicans in Congress to demand censorship and threatened to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave the show an exhibition grant. (The entire story of that firecracker that begat the current Culture Wars -- as well as a thorough depiction of the tumultuous life of the artist -- is laid out in the exacting documentary
Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
I like the title of that film, which comes from Senator Jesse Helms' famous rant in Congress, where he was exhorting his colleagues to scrutinise the photographs of Mapplethorpe and call them "pornography," and not art.
Indeed most of the erotically charged photography I love demand very much that everyone should look at the pictures intently, to feel the charge from the sight of mostly naked bodies -- and then see the fine artistry behind it. While there has always been the nude in art, photography has made it all the more immediate (and dangerously so) because of the "realism" that takes away the traditional distance or remove afforded by, say, painting.
The male nude, too, has not exactly been a favourite subject in the curation of many exhibits, for one reason or other. Writer and artist
Abigail Ekue once attempted to fill the gap when she put up an exhibit titled Bare Men, and reasoned that the exhibit was important "because we are [already] bombarded with the female nude": "The female nude is considered more acceptable and desired and it is usually thought that the public only wants to view female nudes. But there are people who want to see male nudes and not just for the gay male audience or for strictly anatomical purposes. Male nudes shouldn’t be rare – the stigma that naked men are 'ugly' or the myth that a penis is threatening or only sexual should be dispelled."
Suspicions of perversion may also be a culprit.
In reviewing Pierre Borhan's
Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography,
a gorgeously illustrated book that is the first of its kind dealing with the subject matter, John Ibson writes: "It is crucial to Borhan, sensibly so, to recall that the earlier photographs were produced when sexual activity between men was widely considered a crime and a sign of mental disorder, while the more recent images were made in a very different cultural climate. In Borhan’s telling, as social scorn and constraints lessened, photographers became increasingly forthright about their own sexual selves, producing correspondingly bolder and more imaginative portrayals of male sexuality."
My first encounter with a photograph that struck me as crackling with such homoerotic charge was in Tokyo in 1997 where I saw an exhibit of the works of
Sakiko Nomura and saw this...
It was beautiful and mysterious and sad and sensual: just a monochrome photo of a Japanese man lying naked in bed and holding a cigarette, while his other hand grasps the hand of a companion hidden and blurry in the shadows and background -- yet the blurry figure is distinctly male, and it adds to the homoerotic charge of the narrative.
Since then, I began collecting photographic male nudes/semi-nudes, and these are some of my favourites, by some of the world's finest photographers...
Boris Ignatovitch's The Showers (1935)
Andres Serrano's A History of Sex (1997) and Bruce Weber for Calvin Klein (1991)
Greg Gorman's As I See It (2000)
Herb Ritts's Justin Timberlake (2002)
Bardo Wu's Lessons in Body Language (2015)
Giovanni Paolo di Mola's Renaissance Men (2001)
Kiu Meireles' "Renan Rocha" from Bedroom (2013) and Joseph Bleu's Patrick Rukai (2010)
Joe Lally's Someone is Watching You in Your Undies (2009)
Benno Thoma's Absolute Sweden (2001)
Mark Morrisroe's Collected Works (1959-1989) and Marc Bessange's French Affair (2002)
Neil Lucente and Claudine Sia's Piolo Pascual (2002)
Ondrea Barbe's Couple (2009) and David Sprigle's Snap (1999)
Walter Pfeiffer's East of My Youth (2012)
Terry Richardson for Sisley (2001)
#PrideMonth2016
Labels: erotica, photography, queer, sex
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Thursday, May 12, 2016
2:54 PM |
Looking at the Pictures
Currently watching Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's
Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016). I suddenly remember that back in 2009, a bunch of us -- Raz Salvarita, Kristoffer Ardeña, Q----- P------, and I -- planned to do a very risqué art exhibit. Didn't happen, because sad things happened. Oh, well. I'm not sure Dumaguete was ready for that exhibit anyway.
Labels: art and culture, life, memories, people, photography, sex
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Tuesday, March 01, 2016
7:09 PM |
A Grim Reminder
I still remember this from childhood in the 1980s. We were made to eat
pospas and nutribun in school, and I still remember that phrase "The Hungry Children of Negros" being banded around as a campaign to feed children in both the Oriental and Occidental sides.
From
John Silva [whose photo this is]: "I was in Negros last week. Thirty years ago I was there just a day after the Marcos overthrow. I was with Oxfam, a relief and development agency and I was to review the malnutrition situation in Negros. Months prior, there were many accounts of the tens of thousands of starving children and our Oxfam reps there urged us to do a feeding program with UNICEF. I drove past the provincial hospital where I first saw hundreds of malnourished children on mats on the floors tended by their mothers, and later, we were in the country through cane fields and small towns remembering the skeletal children being weighed and assessed by our medical team. There were over 100,000 children in various degree of malnutrition and we started a feeding program for 90,000 of them, hoping to save the worse cases.
"I took this picture of a nine year old girl south of Bacolod who was weighed but the medical team sensed she was not going to make it. She died several days later.
"There is much recalling and writing about the Marcos Regime for this 30th anniversary of People Power and because Bong Bong Marcos is running for political office. I heard then as I hear now that Roberto Benedicto was the Marcos crony who dictated the price of sugar and bled the province dry. And starved its people. I post this picture because aside from all the other nefarious deeds, the Marcos regime was responsible for the slow murder of the children and people of Negros.
"Today I see progress in Negros. And I see many healthy children. As our society progresses and moves on to increased levels of obesity and historical amnesia, this picture should be the grim reminder."
Labels: activism, history, issues, Marcos, Martial Law, negros, philippine history, photography
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Sunday, February 07, 2016
7:45 PM |
The Streets of Dumaguete: Calle Santa Catalina
In her article “The Streets of Dumaguete” (
Silliman Journal, Vol. 54 Issue No. 2, July-December 2013), sociologist/writer
Lorna Peña-Reyes Makil writes of Santa Catalina Street: “Calle Santa Catalina was named after Dumaguete’s patron saint, St. Catherine of Alexandria, known as the ‘Warrior Saint.’ We read that she was chosen to be the town’s patron saint due to the great need for protection against the southern slave raiders. Legends about her courage and physical prowess were narrated by the townsfolk who had observed that her image on certain mornings would carry amor seco — a grass weed — clinging to the hem of her dress, and making them believe that the saint had gone out at night to drive away the pirates.
"I used to walk down Sta. Catalina Street to go to Dumaguete City Hall for some school assignment, as observing the City Council in action. City Hall was an old building built in 1937 with capiz shell windows and wooden floors that survive to the present…
"The street also took me to Dumaguete’s ‘Old Casa Español District,’ which grew out of the original Plaza Complex. Its short side streets leading to Rizal Avenue — Burgos Street and Tan Pedro Street — bordered the place where homes of wealthy and important Spanish-Filipinos used to be. Although many of these homes were torn down or converted into businesses, a few of them still stand, old and sad reminders of Dumaguete’s early elite whose younger generation adapted to modernization.”
Calle Sta. Catalina, however, has also been known as Dumaguete’s “second street,” meaning perpetually second to Calle Marina (now Rizal Boulevard) in terms of being the street of choice for the city’s wealthier citizens to call home. According to gossip, it was the street where aspiration thrived, and soon it was dotted with the smaller mansions of families who could not find a plot to settle in along the seafront, along the so-called "sugar houses" of the Boulevard's "millionaires row." Only a few of these beautiful houses remain…
Labels: dumaguete, history, photography, places
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Tuesday, September 08, 2015
8:57 PM |
Even a Little.
I like how it is when the world comes crashing in, or makes itself felt like a sudden awakening, just right after you decide — like a beautiful surrender — it is better to let go than it is to live in that space in your head that’s dank and does not see much sun, content only with playing possum to cobwebs and the empty nests of birds now gone.
Do you see how it
is the sun that you first behold when you open your eyes? It setting beyond blue mountains was what I saw this late afternoon; but let’s allow, for everyone else, even a sunrise, that sweet cliche. Or if it is neither, just a tenderness of sunshine that becomes second skin. The blanket of night does that, too. Here you see pinpricks of light in the sky that allow you to understand there are bigger things than you swimming in the mysterious cosmos — but you are one with it, the way Carl Sagan once reminded us that we were all born in the ovens of birthing stars.
I like to think it is God in His infinite wisdom murmuring spells to let you see there are infinite things in this world that can be perceived more than you allow yourself to see: that puff of distant cloud means rain on parched earth, that burst of yellow in a flower is invitation for the beleaguered bees*, that gentle air you feel against your skin carries the promise you can breathe again, indeed, if you allow yourself to live even a little.
Photo by Denniz Futalan
(*That's not a bee. That's a fly.)
Labels: life, photography
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Monday, June 15, 2015
8:37 PM |
Dumaguete Fashion Photography, Circa 2010
Fashion photography in Dumaguete, circa 2010. You'd think that five years later, things would evolve to become even better things. But it is, after all, for a place that's next to a bay, a water city: things come and go with the flow of time, nothing really takes root, nothing really evolves beyond the initial gasp of creativity. I wish it weren't so, but it is.
Photos courtesy of local fashion designer Josip Tumapa.Labels: dumaguete, fashion, life, photography
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Friday, November 29, 2013
It is not easy to curate a photography exhibit. Then again, it is not easy to curate anything at all—the careful selection of available works, the creation of a cohesive storyline and theme, the building up of a presentation that best highlights the artistry on display—but it is more so, I think, with photography. As an art form, its biggest challenge is that it is easily the most widespread and democratic, not really good things: because in a world drowning in a glut of images, selecting that which finally transcends towards art—enough to merit a show—is a difficult high wire act. But curate I did, anyway.
I guess it is easier, however, when the photographs one is curating happen to come from two young artists I know whose raw talents I first took notice of only a few years ago when they were still students at Silliman University. They had an arresting zest to their works that became all the more profound as they further developed their skills. I have always considered these two Silliman’s equivalent to the burning talent of Foundation University’s Hersley-Ven Casero. Of course, the past years have only seen more of an unfolding of their quiet photographic genius—and so finally, under the auspices of the Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee, both have finally been given their own show. Finally: Urich and Henz—camera boys with that all too rare “eye”—are ready for the unveiling.
This debut exhibition of two of Dumaguete’s best young photographers, Urich Calumpang and Henzonly Alboroto, easily shows the muscle of their training with the Silliman University Camera Club, under the stewardship of founder Greg Morales. For their first photography exhibit, Mr. Calumpang and Mr. Alboroto explore the peculiar shadows and the interesting geometries of life in Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental. As avid street photographers, I thought these would play up to their strengths—but it was also fiesta season in the city, and what’s best to show a love for Dumaguete than to showcase it in art.
For Mr. Calumpang, who considers himself a minimalist street photographer by heart, the photography of everyday things that most people take for granted interests most his sensibilities as a chronicler with a camera—and for this debut exhibition, he has gone to the streets to capture everyday symmetry and balance, light and shadows, lines and details, hues and the human element, mostly with his iPhone camera. Mr. Calumpang’s fascination for the extraordinary and the symmetrical in the common defines him best as a photographer—and you see that in his shots of architectural detail, of lines, of geometrical shapes. All these from everyday objects and scenes, of course. This appeals to the obsessive compulsive in him.
For Mr. Alboroto, a photographic sensibility shaped by the works of such people as Henri Cartier Bresson, Steve McCurry, Matt Stuart, and Hersley-Ven Casero, has given him a chance to explore the personal through the things that surround him and captures his camera-ready imagination. For him, his photography—even if in the service of street photography or photojournalism—is, most of all, a vessel for self-expression, for mapping human emotions, which is why there is a certain tenderness that pervades all his works, even ones that is starkly photojournalistic.
In both their works, Dumaguete’s heart has been perfectly captured.
Which seems perfect and ironic at the same time because, though both spiritual citizens of the city, both are actually strangers to it. At least in terms of origin. Urich Calumpang, after all, hails from Tanjay, Negros Oriental. He graduated from Silliman University with a degree in management in 2012. Currently a Dumaguete-based freelance events photographer, his works have been published in international, national, and local newspapers and magazines, including
Newsweek Asia, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippines Star, The Freeman, Dumaguete MetroPost, and
The Negros Chronicle. He has given lectures on photojournalism for the Department of Education and several private schools in Dumaguete City, and he is currently the official photographer of the Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee.
Henzonly Hope Alboroto, on the other hand, hails from Tagbilaran, Bohol. He graduated from Silliman University with a degree in mass communication in 2013. Currently, he works as a network marketer and a freelance graphic designer. He does mainly street photography and photojournalism, and some of his works have been featured in Yahoo! News,
Sun.Star Daily, and professional photography blogs.
Catch their exhibition opening on November 29, Friday, at 5:30 PM at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium Foyer Gallery. The exhibit, open to the public, runs until December 17.
Labels: art and culture, cultural affairs committee, dumaguete, life, photography, silliman
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