A QUIET RAGE

At the National Museum, filmmaker unveils his exhibit 'Still,' 14 black and white film photographs that capture moments in the raw; street photography without pretensions, capturing transitional moments in the midst of a rise and fall

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“The core value of street photography is that it is never contrived,” Cholo Laurel says to me at the National Museum last Aug. 27 at the opening of his photography exhibit “Still.” “It is never set up.”

The 14 photographs displayed at the National Museum are all photos from a trip he made in 1999 when he spent all his savings for a trip that, according to his notes from the show, “veered away from all things commissioned and contrived.”

“They are from a particular trip,” he says. “I started in an artist workshop in Portland, Maine, from Maine I planned a route and went to New York then Paris and then, backpacking around Europe.”

The photographs chronicle stories, snapshots of life in transition in cities like Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, Toledo, and Amsterdam. The awardwinning director of Nasaan Ka Man, his debut film, and a respected director of television commercials in the Asian region, Cholo Laurel is a storyteller but the conceit of the 16-yearold photographs on display in "Still" shows a detailed eye in capturing unmanufactured moments, instances of life before or after the extraordinary.

The storyteller is still at work here but the stories he tells in this exhibit are not about momentous explosions of life, it is the subtle quiet of living. In Barcelona, for example, he takes a photograph of people walking down the streets of Barri Gotic (Gothic Quarter) and the focus is squarely on a person merely walking. The famous architecture of Barcelona is almost dismissed, and the person walking is just walking.

“It’s not about technique,” he explains. “It’s not about technical perfection—I just wanted to remember stories that did not have to be contrived.”

In one photograph, a crowd circles over a scene and he takes the shot of the back of an old lady’s head. We don’t see the scene that has captured the onlooker’s attention; we don’t even see the old lady’s face. It’s just a moment in time. When you consider that this is 1999 and that this is film photography, Laurel only had a finite number of film to shoot with, the restraint he shows is dazzling and his choices are completely deliberate.

On the nature of his adventure, Laurel narrates that he “had all the rolls of film from the States with me in a suitcase because I didn’t know where to buy film in Europe and went organically from one place to another; just instinctively decided when to move and where. And then, what I would do, is stay in a street corner for hours and I would look at the light and say, ‘If the sunset is there, then it would be good.’ And then I’d come back the next day to shoot and I’d wait in one spot for three hours.”

Since that trip, Cholo Laurel has been trying to take a month off from his work to take street photographs, maybe part of a continuous battle against the contrived and the manufactured. Maybe it is a chance to return to something pure and organic.

Returning to these photographs, 16 years later, Laurel finds interesting insights into the cities he has captured on film. He shares, “Every year, I would make sure I would stop for a month and just go around the streets and take photographs. I’ve shot also here in Manila. Here’s the interesting thing: it was quite depressing. It was the Manila streets, it was poverty, it was Binondo and everything and Alya Honasan took a look at them and featured them and the irony of the thing is that of all the photos I took, it’s the Filipino pictures that people looked the happiest. [The photos in “Still”] are [about] lonely people. They are extremely lonely. By default, when I started taking pictures of Filipinos, they were the happiest. I don’t know if because I was home or if Filipinos are just naturally happy. But they were the poorest of the poor and they were happy.”

Now, these 14 photographs are at The National Museum, side-by-side with artists like Luna and Hidalgo. What does this portend for the storyteller? “It just encourages me that street photography can be appreciated by Filipinos,” he says. “It encourages me to exhibit more and to encourage the art form. We do it in Instagram every single day!”

“Still” opened to the public last Aug. 28. It runs until Oct. 2015 at the National Museum of the Philippines.