by Patrick D. Flores, PhD. | 2018
Fig. 1 Signos by Veejay Villafranca, Product Image c/o https://www.shashasha.co/en/book/signos
A disconsolate father recalls a searing time: his son draws his attention to a picture he has just sketched out. Seemingly arising, or stemming, from a dream or a vision, it is a scene of his parents being swept away by a wave and he and his siblings huddled in a much safer place. One of them then turns to the father to say that he, along with his mother, would be all right, calmly and with the certainty of someone who has seen something undeniable. It was the day before the exceptional storm Yolanda would ravage a swathe of land in Leyte and Samar, islands in the central Philippines facing the Pacific, and kill around six thousand, including the boy and two of his brothers. The mark on paper, the premonition of the deluge, the wistful parting condensed in an image of kin dispersed by torrent – all this is signos: at once trace, portent, and fate.
The photographer Veejay Villafranca retells this tale as he explores the word Signos. It is a way for him to move beyond the aftermath of Yolanda and henceforth dwell on a foretelling, a future chronicled in a draft and not on the details of a calamity, looped embarrassingly by media as spectacle. It is the foretelling that likewise keeps the art that probes the depth of the presentiment and lets it survive the indignities of disaster and its graphic depiction in what they call news these days. Villafranca’s aperture is not clear and precise in this regard; it is rather mottled both by the elements of chance and the feelings that highly mediate the afterlife of an egregious loss. It scans scenes, or better still, palimpsests of how water in the form of rain or flood, or carried by howling wind, would toss and turn what finally plays out as a frail humanity. This fragility, this finitude is what sustains the photographic project, a foil to the much-vaunted resilience that is imagined to be that which makes people prevail, a counterpoint to the technology that is expected to be an unwavering witness to an always wayward reality. Through Villafranca’s lens, it is the sheer-ness and mere-ness of life that inspires those who overcome to transfigure. After all, Signos proves to be a flimsy sign, a hovering omen that makes sense only when read thoughtfully and longingly as ruin, remnant of lost entirety, remains of the days to come, speck of changing climate as gleaned in a relay of the tempests Ondoy, Pepeng, and Haiyan.
According to Villafranca, the motivation was to monitor: “It was the idea of displacement that pushed me to pursue this project. Seeing different communities affected by flooding and the danger that the next storm poses was my main drive to keep on covering events related to extreme weather conditions. At this stage there was no big plan and no long-term goal as to what it will be.” The vision was to investigate the scenario of weather as a symptom of a climate shift, a planetary condition that haunts all of earth’s transient natives.
Villafranca’s images are either tense or copious, taking in vulnerable people and overwhelming nature, situations of abjection and an otherworldly sublime of the land after a merciless storm. In these alternating scenes of pathos and prevailing, the phrase “everyday emergency” becomes sharp and salient: “An emergency may arise from within the everyday and may be an ever-present possibility, but it nevertheless threatens to transform the everyday. Emergencies are not only rare, punctual exceptions to normality that reveal the nonevental character of an everyday drained of liveliness by repetition and routine. The times of emergency and the everyday in fact merge and blur, as future emergencies are made almost but not quite everyday, while, for many, the everyday remains or becomes an emergency.” In the face of this incipient, incessant everyday emergency, the photojournalistic ethic seeks, or better to say, requires a transposition, from an account of a particular incident to a compelling narrative of long duration, a fiction that speaks to the relations that form a natural history, a prospect of peril, and a present that slips away, falls apart, unhinged from the promise of modernity. Repetition, or the daily grind of reportage, is the crux of the dilemma and change is the key to the resolve, both aesthetically and naturally, in the tenor of allegory and melancholy.
What this project leads us to consider is how photographic time layers or complicates both the time of disaster and the time of persistence. And in this regard, the photographer at times experiments with the ubiquitous handphone to register a fleeting moment of an extremely traumatic event. It was nearly impossible for those who had lived through the upheaval that such fragment of time could actually take place. The impossibility is the predicament of photography, how to capture it and how to register its wake. In many ways, the traces tend to revive the trauma and oftentimes vainly endeavor to offer a revision. The temptation to collect memory is irresistible, indexed through bodies who eke out a new ecology, structures that have become evidence of intense violence, and nature that pervades as if nothing had happened in spite of the inordinately re-ordered corpus of limb and spirit. This re-order, this incomparable tropical turn would manifest in a range of recognitions: the description of fatality, the semblance of catatonia, the calm of mourning, the urgent plea for relief, the return to habit, as it were. The camera discerns this assemblage of gestures, at once urgent and uneventful, immediate and intractable.
In other words, the photographer tries to grasp a way out of the binary between victimage and survival, adversity and normalcy. Villafranca acknowledges this complexity in light of the techniques of media to flatten, to exoticize, to reduce suffering to disconsolation and agency to patience. Surely, there ought to be a trajectory or vector into another cosmos, a level of complexity: “Two years after more communities were destroyed by stronger typhoons and the issues regarding displacement started to become more complex. Poor living conditions, security, health were just a few issues on the new cycle. It was at this time also that I was re-assessing the scope of the project. I felt it was lacking in context due to the repetitive newsy nature of the photos. This was also the exact time where photojournalism in a larger scale was having a dilemma connecting with the audience. This was the main reason why I took a turn on the visual approach, the issues were the same as any where in the world where communities are displaced only that the connection that I was trying to achieve with my images was absent.”
It is through photography that Villafranca claims presence and, at last, that elusive contact that can only be within striking distance. As Shakespeare has presaged: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
This text was originally published as introduction to Veejay Villafranca's Signos. This article is republished with permission from the Author.
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