Attended the opening of this exhibit last night. Awesome photos and great edit (selection). Kudos to Little Wing Luna, Jo Santos and Crown Dolot for this remarkable exhibit. Below is fellow photographer, painter and musician Tonys review: The frontlines of struggle of the Filipino people are too vast. From Pork Barrel to Ampatuan Masscre, The Disappearances, The Struggles of Indigenous Tribes, Gentrification, Environmental Exploitation, and so forth, where does it end? The answer is, as history tells us, it never did. It is a dubious axiom that measures us, and why parents worry? Theyve seen it all before. Globaly Womens Rights, still floats in the ambiguous endless bucket list. On CNN recently the voice of Malala, a young woman shot for simply wanting an education was awarded the Nobel Prize. Also, I only just realized women in Saudi Arabia are still fighting for the right to simply drive a car. It was many years now since John Lennon used the N-word to describe it. Since extending my visits to the Philippines, I notice things as they slip through the cracks of my self-serving preoccupations. Coming to light were the frequency of traffic accidents (-scooters especially). My idealistic reverence of Asian Flow faced a grim reality. Also, among the casualties of my curiosity, shattered was my view of Philippine matriarchy. Over the five years of my extended visits, I began to notice a marked occurence of women beatings, rapes and bizarre things like a womans nose that had been cut off. Shocking stuff! It was in 2010 a woman who had once worked for us as a yaya-cook-laundry, house cleaning and incidently a very talented manicurist, a previous ka-tulong, showed up suddenly at our door late one night, wanting asylum. She had been punched in the eye by here partner. It was so swollen and red we feared for a time that she might loose sight in that eye. Like traffic incidents, much goes unreported. It is with these thoughts In mind, that on the evening of October 17, 2013, I attended the debut photography show of J.A Santos and Little Wing Luna. Two women photographers, who are making there presence known, to be counted among the photographers of the Philippines. As a longtime photographer myself, I greatly appreciate anyones passion for this craft, I was not dissappointed. looking into photographs as opposed to looking at, is what a good photographer forces the visually literate to do. J. A. Santos is quite intelligent in her most notably sophisticated abstractions of the human condition. They are painterly and one floats in her reality, suspended in the silence of those loner moments of exposure when ones eyes are being peeled to those essences of awareness. She reminds us that literal translations are more an ambiguous possibility, that the conventions of the photograph are not always the obvious. We are invited to go deeper into the poetry of paradoxes and irony, outside of our boxes. If you talk to her, youll find the strength and conviction of the concerned photographer, passionate and precise in her fight for justice and common sense. Little Wing Luna. Wing suddenly emerged from Luis Liwanags workshops as one of his masterpeices. A pure unabandoned natural talent, redefing for me, the idea of shooting loose. When I first engaged her on Facebook, I was in California. She immediately diffused my pompous photographic intellectual California School snobbery and said I just want to be a drunken beachbum photographer, I immediately got her, na getz ko agad! I was inspired to loosen my own colonial thinking. Realising I had stumbled upon the true unique indigenous nature of Philippine photography. Both these women stand with all Philippine photographers, among the many Women photographers of the Philippines. As art is always meant to do, the boundaries pushed of our better natures. My congratulations to them both. May we all be blessed with continued work, insights, solidifaction of our identity as a people who want to stand and be recognized beyond stale inert conventions and cliches that bind us, liberation from tragic legacy. Mabuhay Modern Photography of the Philippines. — with J.a. Santos and Little Wing Luna.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 04:15:05 +0000
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