Bipolar

There is something wrong with Rosa Ibarra Urmaza. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her almond face, doe eyes, dimples and winsome smile. It doesn’t help that she has the tendency to flash that simper once too often. Yet, something’s not right somewhere, and this manifests whenever she picks up her camera.

"Bipolar? Me?" Urmaza, known simply as Pinky to her friends, coyly returns when I tell her that she could easily be classified as one such personality. Looking at the photographs Urmaza gamely spread out across the table of a Makati nightspot — a whole stack she lugged all the way from Paco — I am convinced of my diagnosis.

The photographs are divided into two groups. The first is a collection of black-and-white photographs — currently on exhibit at the Powerplant in Rockwell — that she took in New York (where she moved four years ago) and Paris. In these works, starkness reigns but is rightfully infused with a poetic subtlety, like Weegee’s noir city as seen through the filtered lens of Sacha Vierny. The other half (dubbed "Not Paintings — An Exhibition of Polaroids" mounted recently at SM Megamall) is a group of Polaroids that is an orgy of effervescent color, erupting like semen from an impressionist’s wet dream proudly wiped on canvas. It is no wonder that they are almost always mistaken for paintings.

"Or pictures of paintings," Urmaza adds without a hint of displeasure. "That’s why (I called) the exhibition Not Paintings (to) sort of tell people that these are Polaroids." When I ask her if she minds the confusion, she tells me she sees nothing wrong with it, saying that it is actually positive in the sense that it "makes people look twice." On how she achieves the effect of the Polaroids, she explains that she just plays with the emulsion with a knitting needle or any other stylus before it dries. "It’s not a new technique," she says. "Somebody discovered it back in the ’70s but there is quite a number who still use it today."

Can anybody tell which artists use this method in terms of the outcome?

"Of course, like with any photographer, whether traditional or Polaroid, it’s in the choice of subject matter. Another thing is the style. For example you have people like Lucas Samaras, who does self-portraits which are lighted with different colored gels in a studio setting, and then he distorts himself. It’s much like self-mutilation. Another is David Hockney, who takes Polaroids of, let’s say, a swimming pool from beginning to end, completing the picture by collage. He doesn’t tamper with the emulsion though.

"When working with Polaroids, I tend to play with colors like a painter does. Actually, I used to paint with chalk-pastel so I like the idea of combining the two artforms."

Urmaza uses a special Polaroid camera called SX-70, which she bought at E-Bay for $70, and Time-Zero film. She admits, though, that the future of the technique is uncertain largely because the materials are getting scarce. "It’s nice work since the results are immediate. And if you don’t like the result, you can discard it and try again. I just hope that I can continue working with it."

The next day, I meet Urmaza again in Makati but this time at the Greenbelt shopping mall. She offers to let me try out the Polaroid camera to give me a better understanding of how the process works. We go outdoors near the restaurants that line the park area — a developer’s idea of injecting a patch of green in the cement and asphalt wonderland of the otherwise ironically named complex.

To demonstrate, Urmaza wants to take a Polaroid of me — something I vehemently decline at first but eventually acquiesce to, if only for the reason that I think she might become famous one day. When she hands me the camera, and before she can protest, I instantly snap a picture of her as some sort of misguided retribution. She looks unfazed.

"OK now, use this," Urmaza instructs me as she hands me the stylus for which to manipulate the Polaroid. "Can you draw?" she inquires as I start to discern an image emerging on the paper and make the first tentative strokes. "Not much," I answer. (I would later reveal to her that I graduated from the UP College of Fine Arts where I discovered in my sophomore year that I couldn’t draw — at least, with pencils or paint.)

Working on the Polaroid, I tell her that I find the process soothing, almost therapeutic, much like what the people who practice the banal art of cross-stitching feel, I guess. "I think it’s more contemplative in a way because you can work on the picture right away, enhancing it according to your thoughts much like what a sketch artist does," Urmaza confides as we sit in one of the restaurants, ordering only coffee and water. "With traditional photography, you won’t know until you process and print the pictures. Also, it’s the moment that you don’t see that is captured — when you click it goes black."

Urmaza started to practice photography seriously as a sort of respite from filmmaking, her first love. She was working as an associate producer on Mike De Leon’s Bayaning 3rd World when she decided to put up a makeshift darkroom in her bathroom and started processing photographs that she would shoot around her area. When the film went into temporary limbo, she decided to travel to America to take a short course in photography. Her output at this time was largely black-and-white.

"I was resisting color," she replies when I query her about her early preference for black-and-white. "I guess I thought it was too easy, or ‘popular’."

It was only when she started doing a series about the Filipino community in New York that she started to reassess her line of thinking. "A teacher at the International Center of Photography told me to give color a try especially for the portraits of Filipinos as he felt that our culture was, in his words, ‘colorful’," Urmaza explains. "When I tried it out, I found out that it just fit, like it was the missing piece."

Urmaza’s decision to immigrate was helped to no small extent by the fact that she decided to get married to a Filipino based there. Despite the obvious domestic bliss, her black-and-white photographs of that period, however, are postcards of loneliness, populated by transient human beings lost but somehow frozen in place by an overbearing, almost oppressive, architecture of concrete and graffiti-sprayed walls. "New York can be a cold place," she sighs. "I guess you can say it sprung from my feeling of being uprooted."

Gazing at the photographs, I point out to her that her subjects rarely look directly at the camera. I ask Urmaza if this is due to a somewhat latent fear of people on her part — something she admitted to being when she first started to take pictures. "I don’t think I’m afraid anymore. I think it has more to do with the fact that I like shooting people in secret. It’s exciting for me."

A waiter approaches and informs us — with one eye cocked to our table which is empty except for two glasses of water and a cup of coffee — that the half-price promo will be off in five minutes. We both nod in acknowledgment as I pick up the menu in front of me and pretend to peruse it.

Urmaza informs me she started the Polaroid series about three years ago while working on the black-and-whites. Yet the chasm between the two works is conspicuous. However, she talks about both with such fervor that it strikes me as a bit perverse.

"I think I’m allowed to express more than one emotion," she replies nonchalantly. "I don’t want to limit myself to one thing. I guess you could say certain methods or techniques suit certain themes and subjects. If you think that the Polaroids are happier in tone, I think that’s a good point. The black-and-whites are sadder? Darker? That’s valid as well."

And what are her future plans?

"Apart from continuing my photography abroad? Well, I have a friend who wants to put up a photography school in Batangas; I want to be involved with that."

It is already early evening when we finally ask for the cheque. (I’m quite happy I haven’t spent a single centavo — and in the country’s business district at that.) Urmaza has to rush to an appointment with a friend at the nearby New World Hotel. She makes it a point to ask me if I think she’s answered all my questions adequately.

All smiles, I reassure her.

"Can I read it before you submit it?" she asks while picking up her stuff from the chair at her side.

"No problem," I chirp with an ease and bonhomie that surprises even myself. She smiles and heads off in the opposite direction from where my car is.

Lapsing into a sudden melancholy, I wonder if she could tell I was lying.

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