If you asked someone to name a famous Filipino photojournalist, he or she would be hard pressed for an answer. Where are our James Nachtweys, Robert Franks or Eugene Richards, documentary photographers who have transformed the practice of capturing an ongoing event into an art form? Here, photojournalists remain the unsung heros of the news industry, which since the dying days of the Golden Age of Photojournalism, is increasingly focused on the single image, the visual sound bite, the picture worth 140 characters.
It takes time and commitment to be a documentary photographer, and when there is hardly an outlet or demand for these kinds of stories, when the industry is ruled by envelopmental journalism, and when fame and glamour are reserved for those who trade on Photoshop and the lifestyle backpages, it’s not surprising that quite a few turn to wedding photography or leave the business altogether. Those who toil the beats, snapping everything from crime scenes to basketball games in the 24-hour news cycle, would probably find it a luxury to be able to spend months, even years on a personal project. Yet there is a new breed of young photographers who, trained in this discipline, know how to follow a story with passion, embed themselves in the drama, and can patiently seek out the right moment just as they can quickly capture a fleeting one.
Veejay Villafranca has paid his dues as a press photographer, covering his share of presidential press conferences and general news assignments as a staff photographer at the Philippine Graphic. “It was more of a baptism of fire,” Veejay says of his three-year stint, to which Tammy David playfully ribs him. Along with Jake Verzosa, the three of them are on a lunch break from installing their exhibit “Strip,” which opens at Silverlens Gallery this Friday. While both Veejay and Jake will be showing work that has already been exhibited abroad — respectively, “Marked: The Gangs of Baseco,” which was seen in the Getty Gallery in London, and “Communal Identity,” which was part of the Photoquai 2009 biennale in Paris — Tammy has produced new work for the show, a series of self-portraits called “It Takes An Island: or How To Be Alone.”
Tammy is well aware that the kind of work they do may not be accepted as photojournalism by others, like the veterans whose glory days were spent documenting the turmoil of the Marcos era. At the 2005 Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia, a workshop for Asian journalists considered to be a rite of passage among aspiring photojournalists, the younger ones felt the ire of those who thought these kids have had such an easy time, with their digital cameras and never having had to starve for film or spend time in a darkroom.
“We weren’t there during martial law, but that doesn’t make us less of a photojournalist,” says Tammy, who originally wanted to be a war photographer but was discouraged from it by others with the reason that she is a girl, and would have to run a lot. She admittedly spends an insane amount of time looking at the work of other photographers in order to open her mind to new types of photography. “It doesn’t have to always be blood, action, makibaka.”
Her series for “Strip” is, in some way, her debut in the photojournalism/art community. “A photographer in the States said to me, how can I be intimate with other people if I can’t be intimate with myself?” She at first attempted to do European-style artsy, emo shots involving sad gazes at her reflection or lying in the sun, or clever poses that would reveal her room full of vinyl or the fact that she knits, but Rachel Rillo of Silverlens discarded those and picked the ones which mortified Tammy the most, with their unflattering lighting and ugly T-shirt colors. Tammy lifting dumbbells in a shower cap behind a clutter of toiletries. Tammy scarfing Chicken Nuggets inside her car. A bathrobed Tammy, about to enter a steam bath (a “blonde moment” backstory to this photo: she even tried bringing the camera inside the steam room.)
The photos are intimate and revelatory without being uncomfortably so — they’re funny in that deadpan Tammy way, which makes them very honest. “There is no grand narrative, no highs and peaks but the satisfaction of a meal eaten, a book read and a bit of exercise is enough. It is an invitation to view normalcy, whatever that means,” Erwin Romulo writes in the exhibition notes.
Jake Verzosa, probably more familiar to YStyle readers and the like as a fashion photographer, seemed to have disappeared from the scene for a time. It turns out he was traveling around Southeast Asia, climbing rice terraces and crossing bridges to photograph indigenous people during his free time while on assignment. His stories from the Philippines include photo essays on the urban homeless living in cemeteries, the rehabilitation of the abandoned Philippine National Railway, and the gritty underworld of child boxing — stark, stunning and slightly disturbing, they turn an eye on underreported stories and other phenomena that escape the straitjacket of language.
For “Communal Identity,” he creates diptychs of a person and a place, a portrait and a landscape, man and his environment, a human and his home. To connect these images — which are writ large — is to follow an ethnographic theme, but Verzosa is celebrating difference as much as similarity. It’s about shelter as much as dress and one’s relationship with nature. A hint at how long he’s been at this project: one of the pictures in the Cordilleras was made with a 3-megapixel camera. We now have phone cameras with higher resolutions, which just goes to show that it’s never just about the technology, but the technique.
Veejay Villafranca’s decision to become a photographer and his political awakening might have coincided, but they definitely informed each other. He was 19 and a revolution was imminent. His father, also a photographer, suggested they go out and shoot Edsa 2 together. His rolls came out horrible, he claims, but what he saw through the viewfinder gave him a glimpse of photography’s capacity to not only document history but to also influence it. In 2008 he was the first Asian to be awarded the Ian Perry grant, for his work on the former gang members of Baseco, with whom he spent many years developing relationships and trust. Their bodies, a destroyed landscape of drug abuse, fight scars and scary tattoos, belie the fact that they are actually deeply religious and struggle to search for a decent life.
Now part of Getty Images Global Assignments Network, Veejay also vice-chairs the Philippine Center for Photojournalism, an organization that aims to promote professionalism in the industry. “What we really need is a critic without a hidden agenda or affiliation with some photography group,” Veejay states. “There’s no champion or police for photography, who isn’t a photographer or yearns to be one,” Tammy adds, to which Veejay sums up: “We need an Alexis Tioseco of photography.”
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“Strip 2010” opens today at 6 p.m. along with “Malikmata” by Mark Orozco Justiniani and “Saucerful of Secrets” by Mariano Ching with Haraya Ching at Silverlens Gallery, 2320 Pasong Tamo Ext, Makati.