by Antonni Cuesta
Fig. 1. The Complex by Christian Babista. Cover photograph
from Insights: Issue Two (2024). Image courtesy of the artist.
“The old metaphors no longer work,” declares Geronimo Cristobal in 2023 as he shares a Call for Papers for a prestigious graduate student conference. This had me worried about my predicates. He continues, “Help us chart the way to relevant and future scholarship on Southeast Asia.” (1) Over Growth / After Life beautifully contemplates the epistemo-phenomenological realities of archipelagic / aquapelagic discourses; modern abstractions such as spatio-temporal and subject-object distinctions are reclaimed as homeostatic functions and continuities that are akin to life-worlds, unified and emergent, but most significantly, are always marked by emergencies. The now-ness / here-ness / with-ness unity is articulated in the structure of survival.
Despite being grounded on the same fervor to re-conceive local discourses, and in this case, Philippine Photography, Insights does not claim to such scholarly ambitions. While the publication requires a review of academic and related literature as a matter of due diligence, it does not aim to be a journal. It does not commit to any privileged notion of Photography nor does it situate itself in any specific site of legitimization. (2) The goal is to be a collection of articles—a supplement—which can be accessed by the public, practitioners, and scholars, as they find the materials fit and useful, allowing for a rich and diverse engagement with photography, its assumed constitution, context of production, and attendant matrix of reception.
It must then be a curiosity that this year’s theme is propositioned as so: The Complex. First, one cannot deny its clunky, almost infantile generality. The term “Complex”, in a manner of speaking, is too simple, especially when used as formal nomenclature. Casually, any topic demanding more explanation than initially deemed sufficient can be conveniently labeled as such. However, in a more critical setting, a response of ambivalence to the theme can be derived from its uncanny resemblance to John Hevia’s The Photography Complex. (3) Insights affirms the work’s influence in the development of this year’s theme, thanks to JPaul S. Manzanilla’s review of Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines, by Mark Rice (4) which led us to the text.
Let me here illustrate The Complex in a somewhat unorthodox manner, which is by way of enumeration.
- In 2020, Vicente Rafael writes with cautious language, “The work of mourning begins by way of aestheticizing the sights and sites of injury and violation,” (5) a way perhaps to negotiate a critical stand about the “celebration of hypervisibility” (6) of Duterte’s Drug War while trying to avoid directly implicating the photojournalists who produced and made available such images to the public, some of whom were present during his initial presentation at the Ateneo.
- In 2016, the Philippine satellite Diwata-1 was launched, equipped with 3 optical instruments to undertake a scientific Earth observation mission, which includes studying the extent of damages from natural disasters, assessing changes in vegetation and ocean productivity, and capturing large-scale cloud patterns. (7)
- The National ID System in the Philippines, initially proposed in the 1990s and enacted in 2018, (8) works within a precondition of an identity that oscillates between the virtual, factual, and physical, but ultimately collapses representationally as a photograph.
- Since 2012, ride-hailing apps, which later on included services to deliver food and other staples, (9) have required a photographic cache of human and non-human commodities to facilitate mobility and nourishment to the Philippine public. Such facilities later became critical during the early years of the COVID pandemic as cloud-based entities provided for the essential needs of many cities and municipalities.
- Photographic images have been used to create spatial boundaries in the West Philippine Sea and the Kalayaan Group of Islands since the 1980s, through military reconnaissance missions, (10) which were later used as supporting documents in a landmark court ruling at The Hague. In such a case, maps as territorial ideographs, had to be supported by indexical signs (i.e. photographs) which can testify to national sovereignty.
- The legal case Romeo Sison vs People G.R. Nos. 108280-83 in 1995 established jurisprudence regarding the admissibility and “correctness” of photographs in court, independent of an identified human agent responsible for the object. (11) A Filipino can now be indicted by an object in a manner that is quite different from previously admissible evidences.
- Philippine public health was the concern for issuing Department of Health (DOH) Administrative Order No. 124 S. 92, on June 01, 1992, which sought to regulate circulation and usage of X-ray devices in various fields including medicine, dentistry, veterinary science, industry, research, education, anti-crime efforts, and others. (12) The phenomenon which in 1896 was hailed as “New Photography” now poses serious danger to a population’s well-being.
- Since 2013, CCTV footage from the Metro Manila Development Authority can be requested under the Freedom of Information Law, a legislation which assumes and asserts access rights to images produced by the Philippine State. (13)
- The Philippines ranks among the highest users of Pornhub globally in 2021, and women—Filipinas being a linguistic contradistinction to Filipinos—have been shown to be the majority of the consumers of these images. (14)
- The Architectural Arts and Built Heritage group of the National Museum heavily relies on photographs (such as blueprints and slides) for instructions, records, and documentation of sites and structures. In such a context, photographic objects become Philippine topos as they are topics. (15)
- Canon (global) was criticized for an all-male ambassador lineup in the Philippines in 2021, (16) which prompted a shampoo brand to “trend-jack” the opportunity, purporting a corporate moral ascendancy on gender awareness as a way to convince customers to buy their products. A photograph of two long-haired men holding shampoo bottles served as promotional material for the tactical campaign.
- Since 2008, Photography With a Difference (PWD), a group started by John Chua, has been teaching photography to differently-abled persons, which include individuals who have been blind since birth. (17) Born-blind participants attest to “doing” Photography despite never knowing Photography’s irreducible: Light. It was later described that the experience of Photography was a combination of listening to a guide, feeling a camera, positioning a body, touching a subject, and hearing a click.
- In 2024, John Tewell, an American photo-collector now living in the Philippines, was hailed by netizens as someone who “really loves our country,” for making available online images of the Philippines from the early 1900s to 1980s, many of which are colonial photographs from Western archives. “He is doing more than the government,” shares content creator and education advocate, Nikka Gaddi. (18)
Foucault intuits Heterotopias, (19) Golding calls it Ana-materialism, Rubinstein describes it as the Now. (20) For this call, we shall refer to it as The Complex.
As Hevia describes:
"The Complex … [draws] attention to the propensity to identify clear ontological demarcations between the 'mechanical' and the 'human.' Latour in particular has suggested ways of thinking about more complex agents momentarily made up of different materialities… these elements of the photography complex not only posit a more intricate set of relationships… they also suggest a novel form of agency, one understood in terms of the capacity to mobilize and deploy elements for generating new material realities. The photograph is thus neither a reflection nor a representation of the real, but a kind of metonymic sign of the photography complex in operation." (21)
Such a kind of theoretization provides fertile ground for analysis and has proven very productive in several art, cultural, and historiographic projects, especially in epistemological discussions of photography pertaining to memory work and interventionist engagements with archives. While these are integral to contemporary discussions of the medium, Insights also invites explorations of the Complex which tackle the modest and immediate and is informed by the local and vernacular as invoked in the introduction of this invitation. Reformulating Hevia’s (and Latour’s) analytic, The Complex is an articulation of photography’s ecology, as it is disclosed and concealed through a networked relationship of signification, the relevance of Photography as it exists now in / with / across / for / during our realities.
Proposing the Complex aims to pose a challenge to the certainty and resoluteness of our assertions about Philippine Photography, (and by the same gesture, inquire if such a discourse exists in the first place). With this is mind, it is by no means accidental that Photography Chismis PH never brandishes the phrase and instead uses “Photography in the Philippines” when referring to the object of its project. (22) While several documents from the 80s (23, 24) bravely utilize such a title, the lack of consistency and continuity of use makes the term very much contestable almost to the point of being anecdotal.
Two ideas among many are commonly invoked in such discussions. First is a socio-political verisimilitude that grounds the production of the work, and second is an egoity (i.e. the Filipino) that is contained and articulated as a body-intention behind an image. (25) (It is interesting that the closest and logical third, the viewer as the Aesthetic Other, is rarely mentioned in such discussions). (26) While containers such as these seem to work positively in some fields, such definitive commitments are made perhaps in a disproportionately truncated manner. For example, a recent study published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), a statistical mapping project of the Philippine Visual Arts which includes Photography as a subdomain, uses PSIC data that covers “Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities”. (27) By virtue of including “non-art” related activities which comprise 98% of the sector, the State methodologically expands the consideration of what is deemed Philippine Photography, and specifically, Photography that exists in the Philippines. Also pronounced in the said study is the accounting of Photography as quantified in terms of economic production (i.e. contribution to Philippine GDP), a topic that requires urgent attention of the photography community, cultural leaders, and policy-makers.
By proposing the Complex as a critical foundation, Insights invites a re-evaluation of how we have talked about photography so far, not just as a matter of scrutiny, but as a call for openness for other possible productive engagements with the phenomena. Indeed, the discursive registers are as much of an interest to the publication as the kind of knowledge products these sites generate. It is also quite significant to note that such predication of “Philippine” emanates from a specific site, which is the Arts. Hence, a pre-formatting (forestalling) of the language becomes apparent. (28)
As Albano writes in 1978, "The implication of such basic facts is that photography is an easy activity and unless it reveals some points of arguments—points which change attitudes towards associative imagery, it remains at best, a minor artist’s major endeavor." (29) In such a case, we find the Arts being privileged (and perhaps, justifiably so) in an understanding of what can be assumed as a relevant reading of Philippine Photography, as it finds firm foundation within a tradition that provides it a ready-made lexicon and set of valences. In other words, the Arts (in a stricter sense, Fine Arts) finds itself inadvertently corralling the production of knowledge for the visual field.
Jeryc Garcia shares, “the Fine Arts is concerned with the Fine Arts” (30) and has no allegiance to any particular medium. Accepting this rationalization, there is an implicit admission to the limits of such an explication of Philippine Photography, which many are seduced to universalize as applicable and relevant to all kinds of photographic discourses (i.e. technical, ecological, professional, pedagogical, philosophical, economic, industrial, vernacular, etc.). Nevertheless, it is unfair to say that art-speak encumbers the discourse of photography by way of fetishizing art-products (i.e. as the locus of the discourse) and the cult of genius (i.e. a pronounced appeal to names that are presented as locators of historical and aesthetic contexts). The art-speak we should accept is merely a genetic inflection of the locale where such discourse emanates from, and hence does not in any way diminish the validity of its meaning and sincere pursuit of the medium’s relevance.
In 1983, Marian Pastor-Roces wrote a seething critique of Philippine photographs (31) which is saturated with sharp and yet illuminating assertions of the epistemic (and in some parts, ontological) ruin that the medium laid upon the national psyche. In this text, Photography is exposed as isomorphic to taxonomy, a decadent act of ordering anything that can be seen, a logical tool for any colonizer. Nevertheless, the writer also admits to the possibility of “breaking open” the message formation in light of communications theory, semiotics, and cybernetics, which were on the rise during the 70s. Suggestive of this is Albano’s proposal for Structural Photography, (i.e. a neologism borrowed from linguistics and cinema) a term that failed to catch on but has found manifestation in photographic practice usually labeled as “Conceptual/ist”. Indeed, these discursive tools are now staples in almost all fields that aim for criticality. The “logos” of Photography, it seems, can finally be challenged.
However, despite the introduction of Communication Arts and Media Studies in Philippine universities, which developed alongside the grand traditions of Fine Arts and Journalism, Photography has always been explored only tangentially. Even with the digital turn which comprised a sizable portion of the communications (and popular culture) discourse at the start of the new millennium (the 2000s), photography was merely seen as part of “Information.” While a huge part of EDSA 2 and 3 were driven by photographic images of mass action, whether through news websites, television, email, or newspapers, photography was never specifically mentioned in a 2002 study by the University of the Philippines about People’s Participation, Consensus-Building and Transparency through ICTs. (32) Only in 2007, with the rise of Citizen Journalism in the Philippines, (33) did photography surface as a mass-generated material worth considering of further discussion. (“Mass Media” used to be viewed as the work of professionals disseminating information to the public. In such a schema, the masses are not producers of information but merely consumers. Photography transformed this by making the public suppliers of content. The term Social Media was later adopted.)
In the museal system, photography was predominantly seen as part of Filipiniana collections (i.e. local and foreign archives), or as technical tools of documentation (e.g. photogrammetry, conservation, digitization, coverage). In Visual Anthropology, only in the late 2000s has Photography garnered some interest as objects of study, in and of themselves. (34) Even the Arts, which we could assume should have been the first to “break open” for photography, has been reluctant (or maybe resistant?) to such explorations. As Patrick Flores writes in 2010, “Exhibitions of photography in the Philippines come few and far between, and there seems to be little room in the art world for artists to explore the range of this form with both rigor and whimsy.” (35) This assessment perhaps is taking into account that Silverlens, founded in 2005, which was the only dedicated gallery for Photography in the Philippines, had to shift to a more general conception of Contemporary Art (which is essentially mixed / trans / inter / bio-media) in 2008. (36)
What has sustained the conversation about Photography outside professional spheres (e.g. commercial, wedding, photojournalism) to the dismay and protestations of many academics and professionals, are Salon Aesthetics (carried out by camera clubs) and Corporate Motive (e.g. camera manufacturers, oil companies). (37) As Manzanilla notes, camera clubs “invigorated photographic practice,” citing the Camera Club of the Philippines which has been present since 1928 as “the most explicit and most sustained expression of a collective formation focused on photography in the Philippines.” (38) While there is much more to be said about this topic, especially with the formation of Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation in 1987, (39) access to equipment was equally transformative in democratizing the artistic impulse shared within these communities as well for the general public. In 2011 alone, it is estimated that the number of dedicated cameras sold in the Philippines was around 650,000 to 800,000 pcs, almost 1% of the total population of the country. (40) The conversation about photography was carried out by select newspaper sections such as Picture Perfect and photography magazines such as I-Mag and Digital Photography Philippines, which by virtue of them focusing on popular photography, many would argue hardly counts as “discourse.”
However, it has to be made clear that Salon Aesthetics and Corporate Motive as they are used in this call, do not intend to imply a diminutive or adversarial stance towards such realities, as they hold valuable sociological, economic, pedagogical, political, and technical insights relating to the Complex. In a workshop presentation in 2023, Zhuang Wubin, given his specialization on the social histories of photographs in Southeast Asia, imagines the possibility of conceiving Photography as a Theory of Circulation, (41) and much of it is driven by the social impact of Salon Photography in the region. One has to recognize as well that “Salon” and “Corporate”, as with all predicates, are contextual terms that only take shape relationally within different dispositions, actants, and gesturing within / as / through the Complex. As such, the World Press Photo, Cebu Daily News, Cinemalaya, Thirteen Artists Award, and FotomotoPH, all can take on a Salon and Corporate dimension depending on the mode of inquiry. Undeniably, the framing of the query determines the outcome of the observation.
This populist dimension surfaces an issue about the predicate “Philippine” which is germane to photography and perhaps is inconsequential to other mediums. In a Gramscian-Foucauldian sense, how much weight does the cultural elite (i.e. a handful of academics and practitioners) hold sway to a definition of Philippine Photography as compared to the 50.89M Filipinos who wield the power of representation in their hands? (42) Additionally, how do subterranean organs such as algorithmic systems, transnational routes, inventory schedules, and value structures configure power-knowledge relations among principalities? As such, photographic memes, advertising, photo-contests, and political posters, if we aim to be provocative, to a certain extent can be considered “Philippine” in a mass-based sense of the word, a definition-by-election so to speak. This can be construed in another way as the photographic equivalent of the term “tyranny of the majority”, if one looks at the Complex from the perspective of "legitimate" observers. (The 70s term for such is “mass art” or “low art”.) In such a case, it is perhaps inaccurate to say that the art world has failed to “corral” knowledge production for what can be considered “Philippine”, but instead, it could be described that the predicate’s heft is displaced from academic and aesthetic discourses to a more sociological view of Photography as it performs, albeit unclearly, a National Imaginary.
This limitation of the Arts to contain and legislate for definitions that are traditionally deemed the field’s natural mandate has led discussions in the West to reconsider how to “talk” about the Complex. (43) (Indicative of this reflexivity is the recent use of the term “photo-media” in art institutions to isolate the material and semantic properties of the Complex). One important response to this un-ease was the establishment of the Philosophy of Photography Journal in the UK (44), and TransAsia Photography Journal in Toronto (45), both in 2010. In these journals, Aesthetics (or an outstandingly myopic understanding of the word) becomes contingent, and discussions dwell more comprehensively on a variety of discursive contexts namely “historical, political, cultural, scientific and critical matrix of ideas, practices, and techniques that may be said to constitute photography as a multifaceted form.” Such positioning shifts the terrain from photography as a tangent, to photography as an intersection, a Derridean center that is neither fixed nor stable, but makes itself present (and absent) through differentiation.
While we cannot discount the work that has been done in related fields (such as Philippine Studies, Art Studies, Communications, Information Technology, Commercial Arts, Cognitive Science, and Engineering), only in August 2023 was a Philosophy of Photography class for undergraduates officially established at the Ateneo, a pedagogical down-streaming of what is usually considered as “higher education”. (46) Reviewing the syllabus, it can be said that while there is certainly an emphasis on philosophical engagement towards the Complex, much of the tenor can also be found in other humanities subjects. What is truly noteworthy is the performative act of calling it so: “Philosophy of Photography”. The title of the class conjures a cloud of associations and vibrates site-specific topics both grand and obscure (such as theories of affect, speech acts, morphology, epistemology, translation, philosophy of mind, technology, dialectics, gender, ontology) about Photography which arguably would not have been easily discernible if not for the very act of using these three words in combination; and if they were, such matters are usually deemed subjects only relevant for higher studies.
While Insights is excited to receive submissions that carry a theoretical slant (Photography qua Photography), we equally encourage submissions that are accessible to a wider audience. Despite the increasing conversations about “Stateless” identities in academic circles, we feel that the construct “Philippine”, at least for now, supplies sufficient motivation for us to pursue the term, as a relevant way to engage the Complex and vice-versa. The diaristic, dialogic, and pedestrian account hold as much value to Insights as critical indictments, material treatises, or curatorial manifestos about Philippine Photography.
Perhaps it is incumbent upon me to make clear some points before going further. One is the presumption of scarcity of texts pertaining to Philippine Photography. As T.K. Sabapathy emphasized with great regret in 2017, “writing is rarely undertaken by attending to existing writers and writing. Writers easily assume that each is writing the very first text on a subject.” (47) This proves to be the case as only recently, Insights uncovered a 2006 article by Lisa Ito on Walong Filipina, where the author remarks on the unexpected inclusion of Photography in the exhibit, particularly as a way to recognize Women cultural workers. (48) It has to be made clear that Insights does not assume the absence of related literature. On the contrary, the goal of the publication is to encourage the surfacing of existing text and materials which much of the public and even researchers seem to have very little knowledge of. Saying this provisionally, Insights observes that photographic discourse seems at the moment a specialized task for academics. This we believe should not be the case.
Another issue is the tension between writing itself, and the activity of photography. Some teachers and curators have raised the issue about the hegemony of the text, which is tantamount to saying unless there is something written about it, Philippine Photography does not exist. This cannot be farther from the truth. Photographic objects are produced and photographic encounters happen and operate even without writers. Nevertheless, historiography and critical textual support do play a vital part in any discourse. This brings us to the idea of “articulation” which Insights and Photography Chismis PH endeavor to do, an activity we should emphasize is associated to a bodily-kinesthetic event and not simply an intellectual, phonological, or textual matter. To articulate is to make apparent which is veiled in obscurity by the use of any facility and faculty available to a human subject. As such, Insights also has programmed some curatorial, multi-disciplinary, and multi-platform engagements as a way to activate the idea of the Complex within the context of inquiry about the “Philippine”. This we have started with our Video Projects Initiative and the Kwentong Estudyante Initiative.
Lastly, I believe it is also an opportune time to mention the uneasiness by which we have chosen Of Mapping and Imaginings as the title of our first issue. The activity of “mapping", one could say, is a thorny affair. What else is a map other than an imposition of order on an unruly terrain—beings, entities, outgrowth of bodies presenting themselves all at the same time, without control, impulsive, sovereign. Dominion is a word that usually comes to mind when one talks about "mapping", perhaps antithetical to the great (or should I say intimate) decolonization project that foregrounds much of our motivations in the cultural field. For the record, I have to clarify that the Imperial and the Martial were not and will never be the aim of Insights. Hence, we have included "Imaginings" in our title to introduce a potent, creative counterflow that diverges from the notion of "Mapping."
Despite the prickly status of mapping as an activity, one has to see the practical, productive, and even revolutionary value of such an endeavor. As Zhuang Wubin writes, “'mapping' conjures a perpetual state of inscribing and erasing, writing on and writing against.” (49) And it is with this attitude of openness, fairness, and development that Zhuang completes his seminal work Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey, a report which arguably achieves textbook status (together with Guardiola’s Colonial Imaginary) for those who want to inquire about Philippine Photography.
With such extensive foregrounding, I would like to close this invite by attuning ourselves to the Complex with a gesture of sincere and thoughtful consideration. Viewing Philippine Photography within / as / through the Complex opens boundless creative and critical opportunities for the discourse, which it seems, has been in an existential dilemma since the 1990s. To ask “What is at stake in Photography?” is, by and large, an exercise of care and attention. Why does Photography matter in the first place?As Paloma Polo quotes Txomin Badiola, interdisciplinary work is “entering the unknown through the unknown.” (50) Approaching the enigma of the Complex compels us to humility of things yet to be discovered and appreciated. This Call is an appeal to ignorance as much as it is a search for the meaningful.
On behalf of our volunteers Thea Acolola, Monica Fernandez, Lila Javier, Hazel Juniosa, Carmela Rivera, and Anton Trivino, I welcome everyone to Insights: Issue Two, a special publication of Photography Chismis PH. We look forward to your submissions.
We wish to send our sincerest gratitude to Zhuang Wubin and the Ateneo Art Gallery for encouraging this project by way of the "Writing Photography in Southeast Asia" Workshop held on 24 June - 19 July 2023, Manila, Philippines.
We also wish to thank Stephanie Frondoso for her immense contribution to Insights: Issue One and Photography Chismis PH.
February 24, 2024
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