Lola Naning on September 18, 2021, with an oxymeter clipped to her finger. Lola was consuming two large oxygen tanks per day on the days before she died. When oxygen was low, she would exhibit very labored breathing. -On her last days, she preserved her energy by keeping her eyes closed. And I would sit there, hoping I could come up to her and see her. Believing there's a lot you can't see about a person when their eyes can't be seen.   With her eyes closed, I came up to her, didn't know how to ...

Mga manggagawa ng Optodev Workers Union pagkatapos ng isang pulong sa opisina ng unyon. 2021.  -State agents like to demonize it when workers come together. They paint an image of a malicious organizer infiltrating a naive group of workers feeling tired of the daily grind. This organizer, poisoning the poor workers' mind with agitating calls to strike back! Strike back against the bosses, strike back against this government! Organizers so evil, they only have their own interest in hand behind th...

I have made sure to attend my Lola's birthday for the past three years: Her 88th in Pansol, Laguna, her 89th in Novaliches, Quezon City, and her 90th in Alfonso, Cavite. On her 88th birthday, the venue was close to the strike of factory workers of a famous brand of soap and detergent. I had just covered the first day of the strike as part of Mayday. In the car ride, I shared about this experience, hearing workers' grievances about the wounds in their hands from making soap in a factory. Was a li...

My father's side of the family is a part of the Prado clan courtesy of my grandmother. They are based in Camaligan, Camarines Sur, a municipality with a population of about 25,000 people (according to 2020 data), located just outside of Naga City. One of the things about the Prado clan that my father makes sure we know about and understand is our family's collective ownership of a religious image of the dead Christ, known as "Hinulid." It is the image of Jesus Christ when he was brought down fro...

The house that I grew up in is pretty big. It is bigger than most houses I have been welcomed into. I imagine it must be the size of the apartment complex where I live now if the units were combined. This house was previously an apartment complex after all, owned by my grandparents, my parents then occupants of only one of the units, until they acquired the entire lot. Renovations had made these previous divisions invisible. Its design an expression of my parents' class aspirations. There are se...

A selection exercise in manufacturing visual connection, in weaving a believable narrative from disparate parts. To a viewer, nothing is out of the normal, it is a plain series of photos. To the author, there is tension in knowing this is not where the photographs belong. They wouldn't have found their way into this order without the author's deliberate hand. To a documentary filmmaker, this crosses into the territory of non-traditional. Having workflows that organize footage into dates, locatio...

Positions of my father's red cigarettes and purple lighter lying around the house and in various combinations.  ...

A short exercise on selection. Outtakes of meetings and day-to-day tasks at a labor center.  ...

The house, children, and pets of Catherine Apas in Laguna, Philippines, who I might never see again. Members of Altermidya interviewed Catherine for a segment on government aid as part of Alab newcast's Labor Day special. The other day, my partner attended a free webinar on photojournalism ethics. I think I was cooking or washing the dishes at the time, but nonetheless I feel like I inherited part of the experience because of my partner's responses to the speaker's unpreparedness to discuss the ...

Activists at a trade union center gather to watch the evening news to see if the May One protest "landed" on mainstream news channels Told a friend once, "When I have a camera in hand, it feels like I'm working." I find myself re-visiting what I said. Our cultural assumptions about work, where we characterize it as tiring and empty, or alienating, could interfere with what I mean. In a more neutral sense, I think my body at work when taking photos or operating a camera only means I take a while ...

Some time in 2017, a friend came to visit and apart from the usual kumusta, she showed me a camera app that she started using called Gudak. It mimicked the interface and parts of the experience of taking photos using a point and shoot film camera right on your smartphone screen. Comparable in four things: you wouldn't be able to see the photo right after taking it, you could only take a select number of shots per time limit (like the limitation of a roll of film), the touch of a time stamp, and ...

My apartment is the third of four side-by-side identical units within a shared compound. Each unit has two floors. The first floor has space for a sala, a kitchen and dining area, a laundry area at the back if so inclined. There are two rooms, two bathrooms. The rent is around $320 a month. I've gone from sharing expenses with three, then two other people, and now I split them equally with my partner. Since slowly deciding to transition to such a setup, we've assumed greater control over how the...

Food is sent over by officials of the local barangay to a group of jeepney drivers who have been disallowed from their livelihoods since the start of the pandemic -An outtake, a take that doesn't make the final cut, a term that by Wikipedia's radar, originates from film production but can be borrowed for photography. A photo that isn't chosen to be part of the story. But interest was there to take the photo. Maybe improving one's practice diminishes that gap between production and output. The ph...

Group dynamics.Top: Officers of the Optodev Workers' Union spend idle time at their union office on a Sunday to participate in a focus group discussion about the situation of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Optodev Inc. is a subsidiary of Essilor International, a multi-national ophthalmic lens manufacturing company, with a factory situated in an export processing zone in Laguna, Philippines.Bottom: Workers of Wolf Fang trucking agency at a labor rights seminarIf in yesterday's entry, I sha...

A picture of my mom, when I was testing the first lens I ever bought, a Sigma 18-35mm lens with an f/1.8 opening. People like the Sigma lens because of the sharp images it can produce and the f/1.8 opening applies throughout the range of its focal length. The camera body used was the same camera my mom bought for me 10 years ago. In those 10 years, I used the camera with the kit lens that came with it. For some time I did toy with the thought of buying a 50mm prime lens, people often do, but I d...

A photo of Tito Elmo taken on film, next to an instax photo and above a digital print, in my Lola's photo album in Alfonso, Cavite. -"One and Another," is the fourth part of The Museum of Modern Art's free and online photography course, "Seeing Through Photographs." It talks about the way meaning is created by various ways of combining and positioning photographs. When cameras arrived at a certain point of accessibility, this naturally became easy to do. You could take more photographs, you coul...

How else does one have a distinct relationship with fire? In Metro Manila, there is a vibrant activist culture of mass mobilizations, also known as rallies or protests, where one of the "ritual" is to collectively witness the burning of the image of a fascist. To see, to record, to chant to. The act is symbolic of a collective expression of rage, not only in image or sound, but in experience. The image tries to be surrogate to the experience, perpetuates the experience in reproduction, and possi...

Uncle Nestor, my father's first cousin, was "manoy" (big brother) to him. And now, the first person our family loses to COVID-19— a year, a month, and a day since it was declared a global pandemic. When I sent this picture of the last time I saw him, my father replied, "He should have been still alive." It's usual and for me, effective, to express grief through the act of searching for, looking at, or sharing photos. It's a task I feel the urge to do when someone passes away. There will be no ne...

We were trying to guess what the immediate future would be like. Would Duterte's daughter win the elections? Would a 12-year Duterte reign be our reality, or will the ouster movement come sooner? Will a military coup take over when Duterte dies, or when he is ousted from position? Would we see each other again next year and still be unvaccinated? Would other countries be able to move on, while we would be one of the last countries, globally, to see an end to the pandemic? The saddest thing would...

  I took this photo because I remembered Gino's photo series of the same thing: cars with covers on them. I guess feeling the urge to take the picture was subconsciously honoring that work. I don't even understand what the work is about. I just know that it was a commitment to always remember to take a picture when you see the same thing, in different places. It was a commitment to compile it. Maybe he only started that way and made sense of it later. It must be something striking, after all ...