Standing Still

Cockfighting aficionados, street vendors and pedicab drivers.

Faces/Phases of Repression

Faces/Phases of Repression is a series of staged portraits depicting interrogation and torture. These are based on actual testimonies of families and victims of enforced disappearances and political killings in the Philippines. In year 2008 alone, there has been 201 cases of enforced disappearances, 1,010 victims of torture, 1,852 illegal arrests with and without detention, and the list goes on until today. Most of the cases are linked to the military and has not been resolved.

When nobody is looking

This is how I see myself…when nobody is looking.

Love, Mom

A little over a year and a half ago, I left the States to pursue studying in Manila. What I didn’t realize then was that more than education, I’d be learning more about life. With relocating, of course, came Distance—most significantly, from my own mother. Being away from her has made me aware of the little things she has done for me. It has compelled me into doing things I would have not normally done—not without my mother, at least. I now live with my Lola and when I look into my lola’s eyes, I see traces of the same sacrifices my mother did for me out of sheer love.

With Distance, came Consciousness. And with this Consciousness, came Appreciation. These photos aim to remind us of the love that a mother has for her child, wherever she may be.

Living Room

My personal photographic work over the past two years has been night time urban landscapes. No people. But they’ve started to creep in, and that is part of the reason I felt it was time to embark on a portrait project. To follow the scent of that trail.

I’ve always liked the stolen shot, the one where the subject doesn’t know I’m taking it. It lends itself to showing a moment that is unaltered by the presence of the camera – unselfconscious and genuine.

The most compelling kind of beauty is that which has a strong dose of the unintentional. My challenge in this project was to try and bring something of that aesthetic into a situation wherein the subject knows I’m there – to explore the tension between what is posed and what is real.

Asides from that, all I’d like to point out is that these are all shot in dim, ambient light of my living room.

Carlos’ World

Usually decked out in either Spanish colonial garb, complete with top hat and tambourine, or 70s bell bottoms, for his (in) famous Manila walking tours, Carlos Celdran is anything but. Time has described his tour narratives as “gossipy, compelling, but unforgettable.” Lonely Planet has called him “flamboyant to the extreme, a one man show of history, criticism, and trivia, the most entertaining ticket in town.”

This raconteur also happens to be the subject of my portraiture workshop my husband. These photographs, as any
relationship between husband and wife, and photographer and subject, goes, it is all at once muted and effusive, forceful and fragile, and even earnest and comical.

UNLIMITXT: An exploration on virtual connectedness

Mobile phones are impacting societies around the world. Here in the Philippines, text messaging is considered to be the most exploited service due to its affordability, convenience and immediacy. According to industry estimates, 2 billion text messages were sent everyday from the 60 percent of the population of 90 million who uses mobile phones. This has led to the popular notion of the Philippines as the “texting capital of the world”

I am interested on how mobile technology affects society and the individual. Face-to-face conversation has now been replaced by virtual means thus texting has made it possible to create new unsurveilled and unconventional relationships. Texting also allows its users to create a seemingly private world capable of expressing real and virtual emotions.

Through my photographs I am attempting to explore the texter’s virtual world and invite the viewers to reflect upon what these expressions reveal about their relationship with the intended recipient.

These 15 images are part of an ongoing process that attempts to show the commonality that exists across our social strata through the emotional interaction of this shared task and how that, in part, underpins the fabric of our society.

Photographs From Home

As a traveler and working photographer, I’ve taken pictures of many places. And now that I’m slightly older than when I started out, I’ve come to stand still and regard the place where I’ve lived for over a decade, the place I consider home. This is the same place that surprises me with its hidden paths, and unknown inhabitants. In this body of work, I explore home as the area where the strange and familiar intersect.