Fig. 1. Participating artists for Time Bubble, April 12, 2024. Courtesy of Fotomoto.
What is the relationship between Time and Photography? Generations of photographers and philosophers would respond differently. For the group exhibition currently ongoing at Finale Art File, I decided to explore the variance of ideas, often conflicting, relating time and photography, limiting this vast scope to selected photographers practicing in the Philippines, ranging from ages below 30 years to over 70 years. While their ages span forty years, the photographic methods they employ span the 1800s cyanotype, ambrotype and praxinoscope, to the contemporary use of a mobile phone camera with its built-in artificial intelligence.
The most traditional and popular viewpoint is that a photograph freezes a moment in time. Sylvia Gascon, long-time gallerist of Finale Art File, perused the archives of her husband, the photojournalist George Gascon, renowned for being portrait photographer of the late Lee Kuan Yew, who is widely considered the founding father of the modern Singaporean state. From Gascon’s archives, the couple chose a 1990 work Dante R. Corpus Band Series 10, Ilocos Sur. This is a black and white photograph that Gascon proposes to be an example of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “the decisive moment.” A walking human figure is captured at the exact second of revelation to animate the balanced composition of a row of windows viewed from the shadows.
The same could be said of Artu Nepomuceno’s Departing Flight of a Memory (2017). By coincidence, the artist was visiting the Cultural Center of the Philippines, whose grandiose lobby is often empty during the day; except this time, a troupe of costumed ballerinas happened to be rehearsing inside the lobby instead of at the theater stage. Using only available light from a window, further reflecting from crystals decorating magnificent chandeliers, Nepomuceno captured a rare moment that combine the beauty of performers and the iconic Brutalist architecture of a historic structure.
Other photographers suggest that time in photography does not simply capture one single moment. Jonathan Baldonado has been documenting the front gates of Philippine homes for the past twelve years. In his work Anamnesis (2024), he printed and collaged images of these gates for a mixed media triptych that includes further manipulations with spray paint and acrylic markers. Baldonado points out that twelve years of time is compressed in the collage. The title Anamnesis refers to the Platonic philosophy of remembering things from a previous experience. He proposes that human thinking is non-linear—how we think is fragmented and scattered, but still connected and linked, much like internal maps in our minds. Thus, he uses photography to represent thought, which is essentially composed of the past through memories and the ever-moving present.
Veejay Villafranca’s panoramic photos The Seeking (2022) and Hello, Stranger (2022) are multiple exposures that likewise compress time. In his statement: “I continue to look at the displacement of urban communities in exchange for new housing projects. The multiple images compress singular moments, reflecting on the repetitive oppression on marginalized populations.” A portrait titled Viva (2019) is a chromogenic print that he instructed to be hung in gallery as positioned between the two urbanscapes, intended to “impress on human fervor amidst tension. The three-image sequence places the viewer in a position to reflect on the face of dehumanizing urban displacement.”
Fig. 2. Time Bubble poster, April 12, 2024. Courtesy of Finale Art File.
Similarly, Gio Panlilio’s Dust (2021) is constructed from images taken every week for several months. The images capture the Dolomite sand reserves beside the public beach in Manila Bay. “I tracked how these deposits shifted and changed as more sand was needed to replenish the shore. Each week, the beach bled sand out into the bay and excavators were required to constantly push more sand to replace what had been lost. The frequency with which the beach had to be refilled was a constant cycle of waste. In creating these collages, I wanted to amplify the scale of these dunes to communicate the sheer volume of needless consumption.”
Nana Buxani’s Fragments: Tondo (2013-2014) is a collection of pictures taken over a year-long period with a mobile phone using the Lomo app. While on assignment for Al Jazeera English working on the six-part video documentary The Slum, she would use lulls between shoots to “capture images of people and their way of life though still images, a series of portraits, action sequences, environmental scenarios, character studies of real and often unseen lives in the underbelly of Manila.” Printed in square format on Duratrans, they are shown as lightboxes arranged and edited like small windows. From the comfort of the gallery, we are provided a glimpse into their world.
ESL Chen critiques photography and its relation to time in his monumental mixed media work Cycling Phoenix Never Stops (2024). Using the inexpensive method risograph, he prints over a hundred versions of the same portrait image, each one manually stamped as an edition. The portrait was made by layering the same image with Photoshop using artificial intelligence tools. He cuts these risographs and collages them, adding other media like wax, oil paint, acrylic molding paste, and acrylic gel, combining the editions into one unique piece, hence questioning the value of editions. He takes his paint color palette from the gamut triangle—hue saturations that are the building blocks of digital color, representing what the eye can see. With the more tactile material of paint, he mimics the effects of old camera lenses that are uncorrected in the corners, translating techniques from the digital darkroom to painting lines and patterns.
For Chen, photography cannot freeze time: “Photographs are an illusion that captures our perception of reality. There is more truth in a blurred photo because the world is constantly moving. To me, a sharp image is abstract.” Bimpoman’s abstracted image Ultra Real: Emergence (2024) comprises dozens of layered images in a method he calls “photodeconstructivism”, arguably another way to reinterpret time in layers.
The relationship of time and abstraction calls for more vigorous study and discourse, especially in the context of Philippine photography. Tom Epperson, who relocated to the Philippines decades ago, has been exploring abstraction throughout his career. He is interested in photographic images that are not instantly recognizable. Some feature depictions of smoke, oil floating on water, and sand. Wing (2019) is a piece from his sand series.
Fig. 3. Exhibition views. Time Bubble, April - May 2024. Courtesy of Fotomoto / Bimpoman.
Jason Quibilan apprenticed with Epperson for several years. His mentor’s influence is apparent in his propensity for abstraction. X-rays of dried fish, close ups of stove tops and manipulated images of flowers, wire fences and packing tape are among his subjects. Quibilan’s sixteen-piece series of pigment on canvas is his most abstract work thus far. Titled Meditations (2024), it reminds viewers of a swirl of ash or a swarm of insects. These are in fact tiny metal shavings that had been blown up to larger scale. The work further distills his previous ideas and plays on the human tendency to find images in abstract shapes, most popularly in clouds and other organic and natural forms.
Neal Oshima’s cyanotypes, essentially impressions and thus abstractions, are a pre-camera technique, but harks much further back to prehistoric art. Bird’s Blues (2024) are images of a saxophone with the artist’s handprints, referencing hand impressions at a cave art site he recently visited in France. A second cyanotype Alto Sax with Bees (2024) captures a thick swarm of fallen bees. The main difference between both works is that one was made with quick sun exposure and the other made through very long sun exposure, bringing together two different uses of time.
With camera photography, a long exposure blurs motion, creating a passage of time in one image. Jilson Tiu’s Neo Tokyo (2023) is a single long exposure capturing sunrise, “merging past and present: moments and movement in the progression to dawn.”
Raena Abella shot the same landscape with techniques on opposite ends of the historic spectrum. Fallen I (2023) is an ambrotype—wet plate collodion positive on glass, invented and used in the 1800s, and Fallen II (2023)—a C-print on cotton rag, a contemporary method and material.
Using subject rather than technique, Jake Verzosa calls attention to time in an edition from his basketball hoop series. Ball is Life / Navotas, Metro Manila (2018) was shot in a cemetery with stacked up burial graves. In the foreground is a basketball hoop with a painted sign that spells out “New Born.” The image recalls not only literal notions of death and new life, but also of religious conversion, and of growth, as basketball is played by people of all ages in the Philippines.
MM Yu’s moving image work Unbuilt (2007-2024) is a 5-minute single channel video made from the artist’s archive of demolition sites. Like Verzosa, she uses subject matter rather than technique to illustrate the passage of time. The moving image is accompanied by audio recorded from a construction site outside the artist’s home.
Tom Epperson’s Mickey (2009) is a direct depiction of freezing time from the artist’s archive of frozen toys, flowers and other objects trapped within blocks of ice. A plastic toy figure of Mickey Mouse, generally a smiling character, is here with clenched fists and an expression of consternation; within the ice cube he appears to be frustrated over being frozen and wanting to break free.
Fig. 4 - 9. Exhibition views. Time Bubble, April - May 2024. Courtesy of Fotomoto / Bimpoman.
Wawi Navarroza proposes that the notion of time in photography is inextricably linked to location or place. This year marks the tenth-year anniversary of her project Hunt & Gather, Terraria (2014). Her statement describes it as “A multi-tiered project that combines photography, installation, public collaboration, research, publication, and gardening. For this project, the artist invited urban and peri-urban dwellers of Metro Manila to forage plants and soil from meaningful and monumental—as well as unexpected an in-between—locations in the city. Collected samples were catalogued, assembled within glass terrariums, and photographed by the artist. This communal project built an abstract city map from a psychogeographical sample set of ninety-nine corners of Metropolitan Manila (and one peripheral place).”
Hunt & Gather: Terraria was published as a photo book launched at the New York Book Fair 2014 at MoMA PS1. “More than just a collection of aesthetic images, the book also presents a quasi-academic effort to comprehend urban landscapes through scientific methodology and the prism of subjective experience. Within the fabricated terrariums, the city, its memories, and its pressing realities inhabit tiny ecosystems from which larger conclusions, reflections and questions are drawn, imagined, and asked.” Highlighting a photo book in this exhibition was important in illustrating the multiple ways photography exists. While an exhibit lasts only three to four weeks, photographs can be physically viewed in more portable, accessible, and longer lasting platforms such as publications.
More than simply tackling the theme of time and photography, the exhibit aims to show a variance of material and strategy that these photographers have employed over the decades. Wipo’s Lukot ng Kapalaran (2024) borrows from photography in Conceptual Art in its self-reflexivity and use of text to suggest meaning. Jan Mayo’s Curves and Shadows (2021) is a black and white photograph that contrasts the posing form of a male nude with the stark lines and shadows of his surroundings. Francisco Guerrero’s diptych Wave I & II (2017) gives the feeling of submersion and the mounting danger of being overwhelmed by waves in the middle of the ocean. Guerrero is in fact a diver and underwater photographer, trained to work under such conditions.
Photographers have begun to explore new materials for printing and presentation. Mark Nicdao’s EXIT 4219 (2024) is printed on a length of abaca fabric stretched between two swords, like a scroll. Tom Epperson’s Living in the City (2021) and Phalaenopsis (2018) are printed on aluminum, while his Crane 1 (2024) is laser-etched on aluminum. Frank Callaghan’s Backtrack 1 (2014) is printed on paper mounted on aluminum, but with a glass-less frame. This allows the photograph to be viewed without light reflection, giving it a soft and textured appearance.
The mixed treatment experiments of Maya Muñoz combine photography with printmaking. For Palms (2023) and Tennis Court (2023), she uses cold wax medium and oil paints to silkscreen photographic images onto paper, manipulating the paint while still wet, in the end producing unique, painterly images that began as photographs.
Most delightful is Jason Quibilan’s Movement #2 (2024), a steel praxinoscope with photographs on metal. Praxinoscope is an early animation device made of mirrors arranged in a drum that can be spun. A strip of sequential images, in this case a dancing ballerina, is placed on the inner surface so that when the device is spun, viewers see a rapid succession of images in the mirrors, creating the illusion of a moving picture.
As Navarroza stated during our artist talk, the magic of photography is inevitably linked to time. Part of its magic is the ability to increase or decrease scale, create multiples, exist in different forms—much like the theory of time in quantum entanglement. She firmly points out, “Photography is the most contemporary medium.”
Conclusion
Following my contribution to Insights 1, I have chosen another exhibit for Insights 2 to highlight differences in Fotomoto’s open call and invitational formats. In the open call, which presented 700 images, it was impossible to write about each one, among other challenges. Thus, we also explore different modes of exhibiting photography.
Why have I chosen to focus on the exhibition format? While there are many ways to have discourse on photography, I have decided to harness the value of exhibition. There is value is printing and displaying images for an audience to view in person instead of on a screen or a tiny mobile phone. The communal experience of viewing also invites a more interactive dialogue that is more dynamic and engaging than through writing and reading.
Fig. 10. Time Bubble public program, April 22, 2024. Courtesy of Fotomoto.
The exhibition also becomes a venue where one can organize activities related to photography: portfolio reviews, panel discussions, workshops and the like. I left Insights 1 with a question wondering how Fotomoto would evolve. While the Fotomoto open call will continue bi-annually as a more inclusive format, we have decided to also continue the smaller invitational exhibits. Both formats have their merits. And like all pioneers, we will not hold ourselves back with limiting definitions. Despite immense challenges, we will continue to push frontiers in Philippine photography. This is our legacy.
April 2024
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