Kasalogan: The Rivers in Us

(The exhibit from students of Department of Media Studies was caught between the Tercentenary celebration of the devotion to our Lady of Peñafrancia and the semester break that followed it. This article pays tribute to the young artists and saw publication on the Art Page of Business Mirror where the author is the resident Art And Media Critic.)

In Ateneo de Naga University, the student photographers of the Department of Media Studies have photographed the Bikol River, or at least its vanishing, dying tributary called the Naga River. In the process, they are discovering what the great photographer of monumental landscapes, Ansel Adams, thinks of photograph as "that instrument of love and revelation."

For a generation identified with frenzied lifestyle and short attention span, the young photographers in the exhibit called "Kasalogan" (literally "Of Rivers): A Tribute in Black-and-White to the Bikol River"  manage to slow down a bit. The photographs are studies in languid rhythm, as if the photographers are pondering about the phenomenon they were assigned to document.

Has the body of water, polluted beyond polluted, influenced the senses of the photographers?

We can only assume what was happening in them and with them when these students went on a fieldwork. Their mentor, Prof. Toots Rugeria of Media Studies, shared how the students had to cope with the instruction to shoot in black-and-white. Initially, the students were asked to take a walk along the river and look for subjects. Rugeria noted that, in the succeeding meetings, the students complained about the river being "dead," that nothing was happening at all.

The result was an exhibit, engaging and mature. The idea of environmental stewardship remained unsaid but otherwise significantly present. The concern about the dying Naga/Bikol River occupies a prominent space in the discourse of local leader and environmental advocates, the Ateneo de Naga University included. Even the present Mayor of the city, John G. Bongat, lauded the exhibit, for its focus on the river that has remained an "integral part of our life."

A quiet rush of memory and remembrances suffuses the works. The viewer gets this sense he is looking at scenes slowly fading and never to come back again.

All the photos are time slowed down, except for the one by Frances Joyce Vasquez, which shows three boys leaping from some height. For the student of photography, this shot embodies what the acknowledged master of candid shot and father of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier Bresson, called
"the decisive moment."

In the other works the theme of non-movement is fused with departures but never with arrivals, as if the waterscape allows only leavings but never returns. This must be part of how we view development. Everyone is leaving this land, and all those who come from outside bring upon the land some measure of gross disrespect for the past.

Two photographs are remarkable for the theme of non-movement: Paghalat-halat ("Waiting") by Marie Trinidad and "Sa Baroto" (On the Boat) by Kristine Gonzales. The first shows men waiting. A witty cropping catches the prow of another boat beside it. In the second photograph, two boys, one hidden and almost unseen by the prow of the boat, are looking at something. The water hyacinths around them make the water placid even as the small boat has caused small swirling around the plants.

In "Pag-irarom Sa Tulay (Going Under the Bridge), the photographer, Sandi Ghannam, composes two distinct lines: the bridge from afar and the aged wooden hull of the boat. The two lines do not have anything to do with each other: the bridge dispassionate and the old boat, with its age attached to the older river. Even when the photographer gives a title of travel, as in Christian Taduran's "Taas-Baba" (Up and Down), the image bears with it fixity. The boat will go up and down but circumscribed within a radius.

Three photographs carry the emblem of hope, for that is really the purpose of this exhibit. One is "Barani" by Sarah Jimeno. The title refers to the body of a banana plant tied together by two boys into a makeshift raft. For the two boys, the river is the widest, perhaps wildest playground for them, unclean now...but hopefully cleaner in the next generation. The two other photographs are "Garo May Subad" (I Think there is a Catch) by Jeanly San Juan and "Hanapbuhay" (Livelihood) by Marc Serapio, two works of amazing clarity and yet imbued with dreamlike quality.  In San Juan's photo, the boy has the gaze of one anticipating the fish from the other end of the line. Innocence and subsistence make always painful tandem when the natural world has grown less kind. In Serapio's piece, tranquility and purity are romanced by the young mind catching a man finding life in something that is barely breathing.

Cartier Bresson said, "Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. " Years from now - depending on what the city will do to the river - these photographs will not only be valuable artifacts of the past but will be the device or contrivance to bring us back to the lessons of good or bad stewardship.

The exhibit is called "Streaks of Light," a tradition already in the Department of Media Studies of the Ateneo de Naga University and was held last October 2010.  Initiated in 2003, the photo exhibit caps the first semester of each school year in the school.