Fig. 1. Putatan, Muntinlupa City. Photograph by Eric Bico.
It is an apocryphal story that speaks to us at spiritual intuition. Our Indigenous peoples during the American period first resisted getting their photographs taken out of fear that they would lose their soul to the camera. Irrational to the modern mind, their fear meant their image was considered as a slice of their being, extractable as it were and incarcerable in paper. Such philosophy of spirit and, perhaps, essence frames a notion of subjectivity in photography.
The camera raises questions of agency, whether or not photographic subjects participate in the production of their own image and consequently shape the production of its meaning. The questions persist until the digital age, the image having proliferated, its material of dissemination morphed from paper into pixels, transferred at the speed of gigabytes. The surfeit of photography has erased the fear of a trap, showing the image into what it is at the most fundamental level, object captured in light and carving a person’s likeness into a surface. A photograph may be manipulated, tell lies, connect communities, document an event, but it never limits.
What remains, then, of photographic subjectivity?
Three photographers have recently come out with chapbooks to pose problems of the subject. Views by Gio Panlilio curates images he took during the COVID-19 pandemic, J. L. Javier’s Tenderness catalogs portraits of men in various states of undress, and Eric Bico’s Siko Nga Ba? and Mapalad zoom in on the human body to the point of misrecognition. I look at their work, their subjectivity as photographer reproduced on paper, at the photographic subjects and their will to persist in the image, and reflect on my own subjectivity as viewer removed in space and time from the photographic event, all three happening in some singularity of spectacle.
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The emergence of photography, including its conceptual form, has introduced a new epistemic violence. Susan Sontag considers the camera as “a sublimation of the gun” used to violate people “by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” Meanwhile, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay removes the technology from the medium and reimagines photography as an imperial eye constructing the image of colonial subjects that beg subjugation and tutelage. She offers the thought exercise of considering photography as having begun not in the invention of the camera but in the age of empire, when European nations started their mad scramble for the New World. In the same vein, Resil B. Mojares posits that photography is tantamount to rape, especially in the colonial project of documenting strange “life-forms” in faraway places, which means that the technology, when it was first introduced, carried the violent enterprise of classifying the human subject into types. Freezing an image in perpetuity points to violence firmly rooted in the gaze and the power relations inhering in the ocular distance between the photographer and the subject.
In Panlilio’s View, the panorama of a city under lockdown reduces people into grainy blurs and miniature figures isolated in the gray of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taken from his condominium window at the height of strict quarantine measures the government had imposed on the entire country, the photographs are a fragmented anonymity that has the semblance of a collective of people in the street—a security guard in a face shield, a man whose right leg appears to be hidden from view (or perhaps missing), someone holding an umbrella under the sun—all on a zebra crossing, following traffic rules despite the sense that the world has spun of out control and systems as we know them are upended with nary an end to the massive deaths in sight. Other photos show people on rooftops, wearing a face mask as they go about their exercise routine, walking their dog, activities that compose a disrupted life. They keep to themselves, clueless about an observer, following quarantine protocols despite the lack of law enforcement within their own range of vision. In short, despite the apocalyptic nature of the pandemic, these people follow state-imposed rules, their images are dots in the undulating landscape of buildings and two-storey houses in downtown Makati.
“The portraits are of people I see out walking the streets,” Panlilio says in an interview. “More than anything I’m curious about who these people are, where they are going, where they are coming from.” He takes the images from his own place of isolation, from a height that offers him a world limited by physical distance. The times call for a radical change to his praxis, one that reconfigures his poetics of shooting, which “sometimes means being out in the world and always means interacting with people.” The new normal, at least in the first two years of the pandemic, means an awareness of the insurmountable barrier between people, corresponding to the yawning gap between the photographer and the subject. Forced to stay inside, he captures the faraway subjects and reconstitute them through extensive editing, and what emerges in the pictures is synesthetic silence, the muted figures appearing singularly exposed in an empty city. The cubist editing, like enlarged pixels, shows a state of suspended animation where the temporality of isolation suggests either disintegration of the image or its reconstruction. In the silence of the photographs pervades an aestheticized loneliness.
“I would just take time to look out the window,” says Panlilio, “and seeing how people are adjusting to living in smaller spaces or being limited to certain locations. The distance is really apparent. I super, super cropped the photographs of the people, even though I was on a long lens. It was alienating, and it made me feel more disconnected, because of how far I was from the street or other human beings.” His photographs are attempts at a connection despite distance, and the irony of alienation in each of these attempts haunts the images, the distant subjects slipping from his view and unknowingly resisting perception. A philosophical approach to understanding reality posits that subjectivities are in constant motion, but perception—from the Latin percipere, meaning “to seize”—captures one thing, prioritizes it over another, trains our focus on the object perceived. Eliding the photographer’s long lens, the subjects raise the possibility of escaping the unseen observer.
Driven by curiosity, Panlilio observes people with a bird’s eye-view, freezes into frame their state of vulnerability, their exposure to the virus and to his own surveillance, and cobbles their images together to form a haphazard whole. Although the window frames are never shown, nothing to indicate the camera’s place, the photographs and their post-processed forms sharpen the dialectics between the inside and the outside, highlighting the semiotics of safety in the confines of home and the danger of leaving it.
One can argue that images in View can simply be instead of mean anything, culled from the photographer’s having stared into distance as he whiled away the time of expansive nothingness. In an article, writer Gian Lao lays down a rhetoric, “What is politics, after all, if not what happens outside our windows? That is, when we bother to look,” referring to Panlilio’s resolve to become more socially engaged in his future practice. Looking, however, poses the danger of inaction, of standing still, of not seeing. Despite the loneliness in both photographer and subject, an imbalance in positionality persists. When awareness goes beyond visuality, when it seeks context in the images of isolation, the silence in the grainy figures does not stem from photographic distance but from unreciprocated viewing.
The pandemic highlighted the state-sanctioned regulation of our bodies. As the government militarized its response to the health crisis, revealing in plain sight the apparatuses that controlled us, Filipino workers further realized their precarity, when the industries that had long sustained our economy, such as tourism and labor exports, could no longer hold, dependent on First World nations that might easily shut their doors when push came to shove so they could fend for themselves. The state restricted mobility, getting into establishments required registration for contact tracing that rarely happened, and the national ID system gained traction on the pretext of a seamless distribution of relief funds. All these referred to a heightened surveillance of the state, the panopticon in its full operations.
I glean the same mechanism from Panlilio’s View. The dust jacket has a rectangular hole in the middle to show the grainy photo of a person on the soft cover. The subject is wearing a mask and crossing the street, on the lookout for an incoming vehicle and seemingly unaware of the camera pointed at them. The design simulates a window, an invitation to survey the outside from the safety of the photographer’s condominium, and the chapbook offers no explanatory text, to situate the collage and instruct a particular reading. Left to my own devices, I fumble along in the artefacts of curiosity and voyeurism, unharnessed products of a camera that perhaps unwittingly acted like a panopticon. As individualized subjectivity, the photographer who merely observes and refuses, by way of context, to flesh out an image risks depoliticizing it. The private camera, hidden and safe, reproducing the subjugation of the community beyond the window, risks mimicking the state’s surveillance. For that was what distant viewing entailed during the pandemic, the vantage point of safety in privileged isolation.
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While View lacks consent from its subjects, J. L. Javier’s Tenderness foregrounds agency in the way the boys in the portrait series look into the camera. Smiling, laughing, seemingly talking to someone, perhaps to the photographer, some of them already half naked, they assure the viewer of their participation in the reproduction and dissemination of their own image. In the foreword, Apa Agbayani explains that, during the shoot, the subjects were asked to remove an article of clothing up to a point where they still felt comfortable doing so. The instruction was straightforward: show the photographer the limits of their vulnerability. The diversity of the subjects, their daring and docility, shows in the various conditions of undress in Tenderness. While one shows a shaft of his penis, another hasn’t even removed his T-shirt, their bodies ranging, in clinical terms, from ecto- to mesomorphic, as though celebrating the natural diversity of the human body. And the boys in the image are not sexualized, the same way a model in anatomy textbooks remotely seduces; instead their nakedness invites reseeing.
Agbayani opens with the term soft boy, which casts so wide a net of meanings that it catches nothing. Ambivalent at best, soft boy becomes a catchall for anything that goes outside the mold of masculinity. He furthers that contrary to the notion that men are taught to hide emotions, the photographic subjects do open themselves up for moments of tenderness, however briefly, revealing stories of themselves while they, symbolically on the nose, remove a shirt or an underwear.
“The shoot was in fact an exercise about many things—conversation, consent, masculinity, the male gaze, the queer gaze,” Javier says. “After all, we were grappling with the idea of ‘tenderness’ itself and what it meant to us.” And at first glance, one would presume queer subjects, if not queering of the subjects, as the catalog of black-and-white photos further unfolds, the play of light and shadow in the images making for a more robust, three-dimensional portraitures. Looking at them gives a feeling of comfort—no one is violated, consent is the operational term—a stark relief in the hypermasculine physique and brusqueness that plague popular culture. With the wellness movement underway and the accessibility of gyms and dietary supplements ubiquitous, the men in the photos (purportedly soft boys, if one were to take the chapbook’s foreword hook, line, and sinker) pose against the rising trend of lookism on Instagram and TikTok, the flipside of the visual culture the camera phone has ushered in.
Tenderness is a catalog of male bodies in various forms, aspects of their identity made flesh and visible—skin, hair, teeth, blemishes, wrinkles. The chapbook deprives the reader of the chance to eavesdrop on the conversations that happened during the shoot, but instead gives an overview of the general topics, as relayed in the foreword (“As they undressed, we heard everything from hazy recollections of past lives to fresh sadnesses rising like smoke from their chests”) and in subsequent features on the project, which include an exhibit at Everything’s Fine in Makati. What “rises like smoke,” to borrow from Agbayani, is the dialectical encounter between photographer and subject, the former’s sense of being sharpened in the image-making process. “The photographer has everything to do with the photograph,” Javier says rather tautologically in an interview, emphasizing his subjectivity in the framing, the curation, the selection of the boy’s softness, that is, how much of the photographic subject he, the author of the chapbook, is willing to expose, while the reader remains in the dark about the stories, the lives that could only get recounted in language, the past that comprises a sense of identity. The portraits languish in the ambiguity of simply being an image.
Despite their supposed involvement in the production, the men in the images come as bodies already filtered, selected for the reader who is supposed to see their agency in this staged and consented vulnerability. Raymond de Borja speculates that portraiture is becoming “another system of typology” in today’s abundance of the image, suggesting an attempt at order in the visual chaos. One must look past the camera, to the agency behind it, to understand the force of order in the curation of the images, whether in a book or a gallery. When consent has finally entered everyday conversations, what with the disparagingly described “woke culture” has kept a constant engagement in, when it is now the bedrock of any chance intimacies, and when traces of the photographic subjects’ image drift further away from their person, how much control do they, the subjects, have in the reproduction of their own chosen nakedness?
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Eric Bico’s Siko Nga Ba? understands that misrecognitions inhere in photographs. It opens with an amusing statement from a high school teacher about touching elbows being tantamount to touching scrotums, something we have at one point in prepubescence joked about, fascinated with the myriad alarming changes our body undergoes. On the next spread, the zine exhorts readers to let their imagination run free in the interpretation of the images, perhaps unwittingly an invocation of Roland Barthes’s tripartite signification process that consists of “a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and non-coded iconic message”—the first pertains to captions supplementing images, the second is the connotative or cultural aspect that influences our interpretation of the image, and the third means the denotative message that gets delivered through mere perception, something the French critic considers as “analogon.”
Siko Nga Ba? urges for a free association and casts doubt on our sense of sight. The succession of photographs are closeups of rugae that may or may not be of elbows. Without any text, the reader will have to guess, can perhaps conjecture based on some anatomical knowledge of the differences in the folds and patterns that distinguish the body part that is in plain view and that which is conventionally hidden. The whole project comes off as an overextended joke for toeing the line between the conceptual and the indecent, reminding us not only of our basic components as humans that reduce our being to mere biology, but also of the commonsensical, instinctive nature of exploiting something so banal as the human skin magnified.
Similarly, Mapalad demonstrates the same depersonalization, this time by zooming in on palms of hands, the lines of which akin to a map with its network of roads. The title is a Filipino pun based on our notions of palad, or palm, a body part that relates to destiny. Mapalad, or lucky, relies on good fortune whether achieved by hard work or by chance, while kapalaran, or fate, points to circumstances or outcomes that are somehow beyond our control, related to getting our fortunes read by tracing the lines on our palms. The word mapalad also literally means “full of palms,” as in what unfolds on the pages of the zine, all ten photos captioned with places where they were taken, as though they were the last traces of the subjects’ identities, everything else a blur of skins. Bico undertook the project in response to a hurt from high school, when classmates taunted him for what was claimed to be an aberration: his palms had too many lines. He wanted to sublimate that feeling of distortion, of being so fundamentally different as manifesting it on his own skin, by mapping other people’s hands.
Bico’s poetics hinges on an irrepressible need for emotionality. Dabbling in photojournalism as an undergrad in advertising, he found discomfort in the idea of detachment, or an attempt at it, in taking documentary photos for the sake of objectivity. Dissatisfied and curious, he found influence in Nicolai Howalt’s work, particularly the photograph series involving young boxers, most of them boys in their first fight. These images come in twos, showing the before and after of their tournaments, and reframed for Bico a different narrative method. Images, it turns out, could be cobbled together to create a whole new story and have a more meaningful connection with his audience.
It was after meeting Geloy Concepcion in the early 2000s when Bico realized the potential for the human in photographs. Conceptual photography, as opposed to “plain” image reproduction, has the power to convey certain emotions, thus making the project more personal, relatable, granting the subjects the agency to tell their own stories. Like Panlilio and Javier, who explore loneliness and vulnerability in their own work, Bico foregrounds affect and human connection, “parang nakikipagkuwentuhan ka lang sa sabjek” (like swapping stories with the subject). This yearning for an exchange, a sort of dialectical bond between photographer and subject, informs his practice.
But against romanticization, the subject is inanimate, a mere replication by light-traces, analogon of the person captured and in constant deferral of the actual being that has been made into an image. It is not an active exchange but an imagined one; the viewer is in dialectics with how they imagine the subjects to be thinking, feeling, dreaming, informed by a caption or some other context that shapes the perception of a photograph. What persists, then, is never the subject, but the photographer’s subjectivity, the one calling the shots.
I sense this most in pictures that repeat themselves, like in Siko Nga Ba? and Mapalad, in a parade of nondescript images that refuse easy signification. Page after page, the repetition of depersonalized subjects leads into a sense of sameness and difference, elbows and palms are almost photocopied if not for the subtle changes in the patterns, but who’s to say the people in the photographs do not reappear in the zines? And does difference matter?
The reiterations of palms and elbows signal an intervention that calls attention to the thingness of photography: its reproducibility that casts doubt on its artistic value, an invocation of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay about aura and mechanical duplications. The same mechanism behind photographic reproductions akin to a factory of replicas echoes the reproducibility of humans as mere physiological beings. A person is constantly in danger of losing their individuality, of getting absorbed into certain types, of simply being one of many. This constant tension between reproducibility and the individual subject constitutes the photographer’s subjectivity, and although the caption aids the construction of meaning, a moment of confusion happens, however quick, in encounters with the image—feeling takes over seeing, a faint recognition and familiarity with the photographic subject.
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How, then, are reproductions agented by the photographic subject? For sure the three photobooks discussed in this essay purport a practice of ethical standards; consent and anonymity are operational terms that guide the projects of Panlilio, Javier, and Bico, who have staked their own claims in Philippine conceptual photography. Postcolonial and queer, their subjectivity explores beyond identity politics, is not even overtly political, but interrogates the machinations of an image. “Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features,” writes Sontag. “Their credentials of objectivity were in-built. Yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view.” Although she is referring to documentary photography, especially in the coverage of wars, even until today there is always the presumption of truth in an image, an actuality of the depicted thing in real life, despite the ubiquity of Photoshop and AI. Popular on social media, the phrase “pic or it didn’t happen” suggests the correlation between image and the veracity of a supposed event; somehow a photograph dispels linguistic fabulation for showing instead of telling the truth. The three photographers here instead frame truths in feelings of isolation, vulnerability, and insecurity, always in relation to the subjects in front of their cameras, as though the act of reproduction eventually numbs these feelings into flatness.
The impulse to seize an event through a photograph marks our notions of modernity. Panlilio, Javier, and Bico, after all, came of age when the digital camera turned into a household commodity and the dissemination of images was soon made on pocket-size gadgets. The world has split into the virtual, and reality has extended beyond meatspace. This virtual expansion, however, remains predominantly visual, and so the reliance on the image and the accumulation of it to maintain the structure of this new world, the frontiers of which we have not yet fully explored. It is therefore peculiar for a photographic reproduction to continue in paper form, counterintuitive to the digital trajectory we all seem to be heading. I surmise it’s the same peculiar return to analog devices such as the film camera that surely operates more than out of nostalgia, the materiality of past technologies insisting on the importance of being suspicious about total virtuality.
Photobooks convey limits, which are defined by a finite number of copies that depend on the print run and the precarity of paper in a country constantly ravaged by fires and storms. The tropical heat is hostile to books, foxing and tanning the pages in no time. Even production cost is prohibitive, since the country lacks manufacturers of quality paper and relies on imports from such countries as China and Indonesia. Aside from these practical considerations, photobooks also have a limited, local reach, its distribution perhaps contained within Metro Manila, as compared to a digital dissemination, which offers not only the potential of infinite footprints by reduplicating the image in near perpetuity but also the assurance against loss and oblivion. One will also hardly consider the three photobooks as commodities, since they were not marketed as limited editions (thus the fetishization that inheres in rarity), nor were they published in large quantities, as offset printing benefits from the economy of scale.
Yet Panlilio, Javier, and Bico chose to publish in print, exploring the ways in which photographic meaning unfolds on bound paper, as though wresting the book from its textual entanglements and replacing the blank page with images that are in want of a clear caption. Perhaps inadvertently so, they interrogate the production of meaning and how it can be expanded by melding two objects that are commonly treated as commodities. Against fetishism, the photobooks, especially the zines Siko Nga Ba? and Mapalad, restrict unbridled accumulation that is par for the course under capital, reined in by the photographers’ subjectivity that throws its weight even on the distribution of the image.
The photographic subject may or may be involved in post-production, or they may be simply informed of the project, asked for their consent, but in the end their subjectivity lasts only until the contraction of the shutter. Resembling the soul, their traces beyond the capture are for the photographer to piece together afterward, to author a new, perhaps deeper meaning and reframe the image according to their own subjectivity. What structures the photograph are the structures of power out of which the photographer operates.
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