Following Typhoon Haiyan, 60 Filipino families were forced to move into Leyte Provincial Jail after being left homeless and destitute. For close to a year, they lived alongside their incarcerated relatives, some of whom were accused of rape and homicide. I gained access to the prison and verified that families continued to live in the jail after 6 months.
Following Typhoon Haiyan, 60 Filipino families were forced to move into Leyte Provincial Jail after being left homeless and destitute. For close to a year, they lived alongside their incarcerated relatives, some of whom were accused of rape and homicide. I gained access to the prison and verified that families continued to live in the jail after 6 months.
Since this series was shot, the families have long since left the jail, but their fates are unknown to me. I began to question where these images fit into my own life as a result. It disturbed me how quickly news breaks and inevitably disappears while one’s images remain interred in the archive.
For a survey and exhibition of contemporary Filipino photographers in Manila, I was presented with the opportunity to show new work, but decided to move backwards, revisit this series, and create one-of-a-kind ambrotypes (photographs on glass) using the 19th century wet-plate collodion process out of my original digital files with the help of The Penumbra Foundation in New York City.
Everything about this series is outdated or rather obscure from the aesthetic to the location itself. As captions, I’ve used traditional Filipino riddles in various dialects that I’ve collected.
As opposed to an exercise engaging in nostalgia, my decisions emerged from a need to consecrate and imbue these seemingly generic and direct images of Filipino faces with the fragility and unseen idiosyncrasies of that traumatic moment in time.