Fans congratulate actress Judy Ann Santos during the global premiere of the indie film Ploning at the Meralco Theatre, Monday. Ploning, a film by Panoramanila, is set in Cuyo Palawan and is based on a local folksong about a woman torn between following her first love and caring for a child named Digo.
For more information please visit www.ploningthemovie.com
on the road to kanawan, an aeta community in morong, bataan. the energy in this place is just amazing.
punked with my friend lai on fieldwork. despite the wonderful dusk light when we arrived, i refrained from taking photos on my first visit save from this one shot which they requested i take. kuya joe and the gang seem quite happy and proud of their new uniforms. hope they win the league. :) hope i get to watch some of their games.
more on-the-road snaps here.
Electro went camping at Anawangin Beach in Zambales this weekend. He tried to cross the sea to Capones Island to greet Mr. Lighthouse. Alas, the boat couldn't get near enough and Electro did not know how to swim from boat to shore. Instead, he contented himself looking at glorious rock formations bathed in gold. Electro will keep you posted about his adventures and misadventures in the days to come. Now he just needs rest. :)
bureaucracy from UP, is community organizer 1. Lai, who has a BA in political science and an MA candidate of the same track in Ateneo, is community organizer 2. I am co2's friend doubling as a photographer. (Photo 1: During the commute, Kuya Borms, the real Mr. Pure Energy, couldn't stop talking about his work as a community organizer )
We arrived at the Bataan Technological Park Inc. (BTPI) which is a sprawling area of trees and grass dotted with bungalows--remnants of hospitals, houses and dormitories that were built by the former First Lady Imelda Marcos in the 1970's for Vietnamese refugees. Today it houses some residents and the Bataan Center for Innovative Science and Technology, Inc.
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BCISTI), an NGO which assists women and the Aeta community in Morong to use organic natural resources and develop food and cosmetic products. (Photo 2: Lai and Bulak. Lai works for Got Heart Foundation which partners with BCISTI in the development and marketing of their products. Bulak is the friendly housedog who seems to be well-fed indeed.)
What keeps community work and scientific research going like a well oiled machine is good food. BCISTI's master chef, Kuya Jun is the dynamo of the kitchen. Meals are simple yet satisfying and you gotta hand it to the man. He is creative as hell. During a few rounds of kasuy wine, when Kuya Uly talked of rattan shoots in the scientific, Kuya Jun zoned out and thought of dishes that he could probably whip up with these. (Photo 8: Kuya Jun fixes breakfast: corned beef sauteed with cabbage).
Livelihood is not the sole assistance that BCISTI and Got Heart provide for the Aetas. This time, they sought the help of Ateneo Human Rights Center to conduct a legal mission to help the community understand better the laws that they can use to protect their rights. One common problem of the Aetas is lack of birth certificates and other papers that they need to be able to obtain social services from the government. 
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Introducing: SIP, the first ever cafe lifestyle magazine in the
Something is bound to go wrong when a novice like me tries to fix melted light seals by herself, although with advice from the experts. These have been shot with my Electro gsn 35 using Kodak Max 400 expired film while Melai and I were catching up on work last Sunday. I think I need to redo the process of stuffing mousepad foam into the grooves around the camera door and pasting some into the latches all over again. Would you look at that! Sigh. Anybody knows what I must've done wrong? Help!
These are excerpts from Susan Sontag's book On Photography. 3di's Ranulfo sent me the link and I find it very insightful and thought-provoking. I'd like to read the whole book. Okay people, it's official. I'm starting my 2007 Christmas wish list with this at number 1.
"Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a 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. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.
That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art."
