To Womb It May Concern
Always I’ve considered photographing musicians to be a big deal. Not so much because music has kind of been a huge part of my life (like I mentioned in a previous post, I was raised in a household where musicality was, for the most part, the glue when all else failed, and I also happened to play an active role—as band publicist and rock writer—when the Cebu music scene reached its peak during the late ‘90s/early 2000s), and not so much because I am a frustrated musician (yes, I did try to pick up the piano and the guitar, but they didn’t like me very much), but because most of the great photographers that I’ve admired from the start—Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, et al.—have produced some of their most memorable images by collaborating with musical artists. So imagine my excitement when I was commissioned to do this band’s photos! And for their debut album cover, no less! Of course, I foamed at the mouth a little—OK, a lot—when the folks at 22 Tango Records, with whom this band is signed to, announced that they were signing me up for this project. It was all sorts of emotions rushing through my veins, like I was about to be reunited with a long-lost friend, or like I was about to get a new tattoo! I mean, things like this don’t happen to me everyday—or at all to some people! Finally, here was my chance to tick one off my list of dream projects!
Although this was my first time to photograph a band, this wasn’t my first time to work in a photo shoot that involved musicians. Back in the day I’d used to do tag along with the now-defunct Glitch to the shoots for most of their magazine appearances following their signing to OctoArts EMI. Some five years ago I’d helped style Urbandub bassist Lalay Lim for the album cover shoot for the band’s fourth album Under Southern Lights (EMI Philippines). And then just a little over a year ago I’d styled—and shot, as “second shooter” to my mentor Malou Pages—singer-songwriter Cattski for the album cover of her latest release 0:00:00. It was being exposed to these kinds of assignments that had left an impression in my creative psyche, and that had showed me that there was a certain quality to doing portraits for musicians that you just didn’t get when you were photographing regular, non-musical folk, or even models (to me one exception would be Ford Models Supermodel of the World-Philippines 2001 titleholder Marjay Ramirez, of course, because that girl is just a rock star in her own right). “It’s all about charisma,” an ex-DJ friend had told me at one point, “that one thing that, even when they’re just standing there, makes everything else around them freeze in time.” And for the longest time that became one of my favorite stories to tell: how, during the aforementioned Urbandub shoot, we’d picked an unexceptional location—just a prosaic patch of arid land in the North Reclamation area, a few steps from where they’d begun erecting the new Cebu Doctors’ University—and how the props had looked unimpressive—just a dusty old leather couch that had presumably been snatched from Lalay’s father’s office—but once the band had stepped into photographer Charles Buenconsejo’s frame the whole scenery just…transformed. “That’s the thing about musicians,” I would tell my friends over and over again, “they have this certain air about them that just takes over, and then commands the picture.”
Funny thing then that when I began work on this project I seemed to forget about that whole “charisma” thing and ended up burying myself neck-deep in preparations for the concept, locations and the props. Perhaps it was anxiety in my part, knowing I had to do a damn good job because (1) this was my first solo photography project that involved musicians, and (2) I needed to redeem myself in the eyes of these people because when I’d been commissioned to do the photos of another 22 Tango Records artist (Undercover Grasshoppers) a couple of months back that had turned out to be, in Facebook parlance, an “epic fail” (i.e., it never materialized). I think that, in the four weeks that I was given to prepare for this whole thing, only 20 or 30 percent of that time was spent talking to the band, and the other 70 or 80 percent was spent overthinking the concept!
The band is called Womb, and the music that they make is predominantly trip hop/folktronica/experimental rock—this in itself contributed to my urge to devise a crack concept, because I figured, hey, not a lot of artists in this part of the world were doing this kind of sound, so I better come up with images that would further set them apart from their peers. The overthinking officially set in after they told me they were baptizing their album Anesthesiac, and my first reaction was, “How very clinical!” I proceeded to ruminate, What is it with trip hop/electronica and its affinity to the clinical/medical? My immediate case in point: Massive Attack’s 1998 hit “Teardrop” as backdrop to the anatomy-themed opening sequence of the Fox medical drama House, M.D. I thought to myself, I have to come up with something as clever as that!
I became so relentless in my quest for the textbook clinical/medical theme that I ended up spending two full weeks going around town and pulling some old strings, ringing my friends from college (yes, I went to med school) and every single doctor I knew to see if the hospitals they worked in would allow me to borrow a couple of old gurneys that were no longer being used, or even an ambulance truck. I even mooched a couple of straitjacket-looking garments off a friend who was into that kind of stuff (did you know there’s a local clothing brand called Mental who actually makes these kinds of clothes?). This was the sick scenery that I was beginning to paint in my head, you see: three dilapidated, rusty gurneys, one for each band member, smack in the middle of a grassy field that’s dry as bone, and the band in straitjackets, with spaced-out looks in their faces. Alas, it turned out I was in for not just a bumpy ride, but for a fruitless crusade as well: my liaisons told me that none of the hospitals were willing to grant me the use of their old gurneys, not even the ones that were begging to be thrown to the junk shop! They also were not willing to lend us an ambulance truck! I wondered if it had something to do with medical ethics in the general sense, kind of like how, as I was told my by friends who are nurses, you were not allowed to use a nurse’s uniform for a conceptual shoot, even if didn’t involve any sleaze (exactly the reason why, for the Pearl Harbor-inspired engagement shoot that we did back in June, we decided to shelve the 1950s nurse costume that we’d had made in Manila).
When it became painfully clear that I was never going to get the straitjacket-and-gurney diorama that I wanted, and we had less than two weeks left until the actual shoot date, I decided to just roll with the punches and reach into my back pocket for Plan B. And that’s how we came up with all that you see right here. No gurneys? Fine! Give me a hotel room and a hotel bed! Luckily, a close friend of the producer was set to throw a little hotel room party over at the old Montebello Villa Hotel down Banilad, and she said we could have the place to ourselves the morning after. We did three sets at the hotel. It was my way of playing safe—you know, just in case the first and the second didn’t work then we still had a third one to fall back on. Everything that we did in that cramped 250-square-foot space could be summarized as an alchemy of influences and interpretations. The set where I had them don white bathrobes and order room service breakfast, that was me thinking of the lines “And in the morning/ I render numb the tongue that asks for an encore” from their song “Aftertaste,” and taking a cue from that circa 1975 Annie Leibovitz photograph of an emaciated, bathrobe-clad Mick Jagger in a Buffalo, NY, hotel elevator. The set where I had them fool around with party hats, party blowouts, some confetti, and a bottle of Scotch, a projection of my fascination with the whole hotel room trashing thing (except we had to go easy on the trashing part, because we were only borrowing the room, remember?); and the part where I had the frontwoman Chai Fonacier wear a Mickey Mouse hat (and old one of mine from one of my trips to Anaheim Disneyland, and I just wrapped the ears in sequined fabric to make it look a bit outré) was inspired by that 1987 Herb Ritts photograph of Madonna wearing Mickey Mouse ears (shot in Tokyo). Finally, the set where I had Chai show a little skin was inspired by another song of theirs called, well, “Skin,” that goes: “Shadows playing on skin/ the closest to a touch/ A fleeting glance; a fading epitaph/ Your skin: the graveyard of desire.” (Perfect, too, that Chai had just gotten a brand spanking new tattoo on her upper back!) Oh, and if all the hotel room photos have kind of a ménages à trois vibe to them, that might have been because I wanted to allude to a line from another song of theirs, “30th and 1st,” that goes: “I understand the mechanisms of a triangle.”
It all turned out alright after all. You see, while I was taking the first few shots my mind wasn’t completely in the right there and then, as all I could think of was the straitjacket-and-gurney scene that I had originally envisioned. But, boy, were the band ever their element! Whether or not they felt good about the setup(s), they didn’t show it, or that didn’t matter to them—what mattered was that they felt good about themselves, and that was what they wanted to come through in the pictures. They were professional in a way that none of us—not even their producers—had ever seen before. And that’s how the pictures turned out pretty decent, even though the person behind the camera—A.K.A. me—was kind of apathetic about the whole thing. It was only upon seeing how the band behaved in front of the camera that I was reminded of the “charisma” factor—I realized that I’d only been wasting my time and energy stressing about the concept, the locations and the props, when all of it could’ve been trouble-free had I just remembered to consider that factor. That was when I made a mental note: Next time, when photographing musicians, try not to be distracted by the complicated that you end up losing sight of the comfortable. Look past the surface, like album titles, and talk to them about what they want. Finally, once they’re in front of your camera, learn to just let go—of preconceptions and premeditations—and just allow them and their personas to transcend the context and the picture.
Actually, it kind of worked to my advantage that the whole straitjacket-and-gurney thing didn’t materialize, because shelving the, um, psychiatric ward connotations only made room for me to beef up the styling aspect and pursue a few previously untapped resources. Classic case of how a lost cause can have a strange way of turning into a golden opportunity! For the guys (instrumentalists Anthony Uy and Fender Figuera) I looked to Urban Outfitters’ early fall 2010 catalog for inspiration, as well as various Barneys CO-OP catalogs (spring/summer 2009 and spring 2011; yes, I have a weird habit of collecting catalogs). For Chai, I allowed her one grungy outfit, and that’s it, because for majority of the pictures I wanted to portray her as an ingénue by having her slip into girly—albeit not necessarily dainty—cocktail threads from up-and-coming young designer Paco Serafica. People tried to sway me from taking this route, pointing out that Chai was a no-fuss, gamine kind of girl. Trust me, I wanted to respect that, but I felt it was my duty to highlight her being the only female in an otherwise all-male collective! Plus, although she technically wasn’t new to the scene, having been around doing vocals for another band called Mary Peril (formerly known as Balde ni Allan), this album with Womb was to represent her first major breakthrough, and so what better way to celebrate that than by giving her a debutante-like image, right? Also, they could’ve fooled me about the gamine part—anyone who samples/references the Madame de Pompadour in their songwriting (in “Aftertaste” she croons in her velveteen voice, “At sunrise as you asked to be excused:/ Après nous, le Déluge”) is more vixen than gamine in my book.
I feel like I should take the time out to talk about the night shots wherein I had them stand against a fiercely burning flame, because those are the ones that have been getting a lot of positive feedback ever since I put out the sneak peek some eight weeks ago. I can tell you now that that set was inspired by the music video of Hole’s “Malibu” from 1998 (directed by Paul Hunter), in which they set fire to a lot of stuff, including precious palm trees. I was also taking a cue from their own song “30th and 1st,” in which Chai sings, “Moments rain like ember/ What this love is made of.” Although the resulting photos look straightforward, that set was actually the trickiest of all. You see, the original plan was to have them stand in front of three strips of white cloth doused in lighter fluid, suspended from a 10-foot-high clothesline. As luck would have it, that plan turned out to be, again, in Facebook parlace, an “epic fail’—I tossed a lighter at the thing, and immediately a fire was ablaze, but only to fizzle out two or three seconds later, before I could make my way back to the tripod where my camera sat waiting! Didn’t see that coming! We were all taken aback. Thankfully, 22 Tango’s April Ordesta was quick to suggest, “Why don’t we just build a campfire?” It started to rain hard, too, in the middle of it all, but we were already on a roll, and there was no stopping us now. Everyone on set started singing the chorus of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain”—although in my head I was signing a different tune: “Fire in the Pouring Rain” by the Blackouts (2004)—and that’s how we got the job done. Fun times, I know!
On the subject of fires that fizzle out and the resilience that makes us bounce back in the game, I was just reading my prized copy of Annie Leibovitz’s At Work (a present from a friend in D.C.—thanks, Irene!) last week, and I stumbled upon her account of the work they put into the photo on the cover of the July 27, 1978, issue of Rolling Stone—Patti Smith standing in front of barrels of flame. Annie told the story of how the initial plan had been to photograph the punk star “in front of a huge wall of flame,” and so they’d “strung up a net soaked in kerosene” behind her, and then set fire to it—alas, that flame had only “lasted for about five seconds.” Eventually they’d decided to set fire to the barrels of kerosene themselves, and that was how they’d gotten their picture. Wasn’t that the exact same thing that happened to us? I couldn’t help but get goosebumps at the parallelism of it all. A year ago when I’d done work for Cattski’s album, Patti Smith had been the central inspiration, and that had all been deliberate. This time around, for this shoot right here, I hadn’t even considered Ms. Smith, but still she found a way to sneak through the back door. God bless the godmother of punk, and may her fire never cease to burn!
Womb is dropping their debut single “Good” today (December 8 Manila time). If you’re in town, and you want to show some love, it’s at Harold’s Hotel down Gorordo and Rosal, and the show starts at 930 PM. I know some of you have kind of lost faith in Cebu music, but trust me when I say this band has got what it takes to make us all believers again! As for me, I’m not styling them tonight, but I will be during the official album launch early next year—and that’s another thing to look forward to!
Charisse “Chai” Fonacier, Anthony Uy and Fender Figuera, collectively known as Womb | Photographed and styled by Angelo Kangleon in Cebu City, Cebu, on September 30, 2012 | Makeup by Justine Gloria | Hair by Sherwin Amodia | Lighting director: Marlowe Guinto | Sittings assistant: April Ordesta | On Chai: Black semi-sheer stripe chiffon corset minidress, Paco Serafica; scarlet leatherette-and-lace minidress with recycled plastic cup skirt in overlapping scale-like pattern, Paco Serafica; black mesh skirt, stylist’s own | On Anthony: Flannel shirt, Heritage 1981, Forever 21; black biker jacket, Zara Man; eggshell silk skinny tie, Springfield UP by Springfield; 8-eyelet 1460 Dr. Martens boots in cherry red, his own | On Fender: Black-and-white gingham dress shirt, Divided by H&M; black sleeveless tuxedo jacket, Protacio; black-and-white striped cotton/silk blend skinny tie, Urban Outfitters; “Misfits” acid wash denim vest, stylist’s own; grey micro fleece hoodie, Uniqlo Undercover by Jun Takahashi; black workboots, Topman; black faux plug earrings, Santee Alley (downtown L.A.)
It’s Fly When Girls Stop By for the Summer 2: Theresa
Couple of photos that I took of my sister’s best friend Theresa, who’d flown in from Amsterdam to visit us in California for 9 days. Yes, you read that right: 9 days. Apparently that’s all the vacation that some people need, and I salute them, because to the impractical and impossible little brats like myself if it’s not more than, say, 60 days it’s not considered a vacation at all!
Actually she wasn’t just there to visit us. She was on a mission, too—or, make that two. One was to get a box of those fiendishly delicious Avocado Egg Rolls from Cheesecake Factory for her boss (apparently they don’t have Cheesecake Factory in Amsterdam), and two was to eat at every single American diner-inspired restaurant that we stumbled upon. The latter proved to be a challenge, because although it wasn’t hard to find establishments in L.A. that served stuff similar to traditional diner cuisine and that had interiors that mimicked traditional diner décor (hello, Johnny Rockets), it was rather toilsome to look for one that had a vegetarian menu! Yes, Theresa here is a vegan—I don’t know when or how it all started, but it was somewhere between her move from London to Amsterdam. I admire people who have a certain discipline when it comes to what they put in their plate, but, damn, girl, must you make it hard for the rest of us, too? (Just kidding!)
Backpedaling to the 9-day issue: I only got to see her for 5 ½ days because I had to leave for New York, and so we never got to have the real deal photo shoot that we’d planned (the original plan had been to shoot at Malibu’s Paradise Cove, because she’d asked to be photographed at “the most beautiful beach in California”). I kept on asking her to extend her stay, but she said it wasn’t that simple because she was anticipating a busy time at work. Turned out that although the 9 days weren’t enough to afford us a decent photo shoot, they were enough to make her fall in love with America—and to convince her to consider moving to L.A.!
During her first few weeks back in Europe she wouldn’t stop messaging us about how California wouldn’t stop calling her name in her dreams. (I couldn’t blame her—I’d had the exact same nightmares, too, only a few years back, after my first visit to L.A.) I have no idea what happened between then and now, but today it looks like she’s a little undecided: she’s smitten about America, yes, but at the same time she can’t bear the thought of leaving her beloved Amsterdam behind. I’m thinking I should send her some photos that I took of Paradise Cove—you know, to remind her that we’ve got unfinished business, and to convince her that people who say “there is no place like home” have obviously never been to California! LOL. Seriously, though, my only wish is for her to stop overthinking—and for her to just follow her heart.
Theresa Marie Wakeley | Photographed by Angelo Kangleon in Los Angeles, CA, on May 3, 2012, and in San Diego, CA, on May 5, 2012
Shake It Like a Polaroid Picture 2
Just when you think I’m done with this crap, here I am again with another set of Poladroids.
Blame it on design It Girl Rita Konig. I was at three different bookstores this month looking for a copy of her book Domestic Bliss but couldn’t find one (don’t they stockpile on anything other than teenage vampire horseshit these days?), so I was forced to dig up the archives at NYTimes.com to revisit her old columns (she no longer writes for them, by the way; I think she has since moved to the Wall Street Journal). For once, I was beginning to obsess about decorating, and not spending too much time looking at photoblogs. I read about her penchant for charming pieces of tobacciana (a pink glass ashtray that gets to go with her wherever she goes, cute little glass match strikers, etc.), and her quirky yet practical method of entertaining (“I don’t have a dining table, but I do have a coffee table, a newly upholstered sofa and a kitchen large enough to cook in, so dinner is eaten off of large art books on laps, or sitting cross-legged at the coffee table”). But what really struck a chord with me was her article on “sticking photos straight up on the wall,” pointing out “how unfashionable it has become to put framed photographs on tables,” and so what she does is she puts up a Polaroid wall in her kitchen. What a novel idea! Not to mention practical and stylish!
Well, the practical part is almost debatable. For one, nobody could figure out where my Dad had kept his old Polaroid Sun 600s (if he’d even kept them at all), and even if we knew, it would be fiendishly difficult to obtain instant film in this part of the world. But, hey, there’s always Poladroid, right?
Here are some of the Poladroids that I am considering printing and putting up against my kitchen wall, again, created using random snapshots from my trips from the last three years. Of course, this means I’m going to have to print some of the ones that I made last month, too. They won’t look like actual Polaroids when they’re printed, but they will, from afar (I love that I kind of have that Rita Konig kind of thinking now!).
You guys have a good weekend now! Remember, inspiration is everywhere—even in the things that you settle for when you still haven’t found what you’re looking for (am I even making any sense here?).
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#46 and #47: At the Brooklyn Bridge with my friend Anne Alegrado’s daughter Ellis, a.k.a. my uptown girl. This was my first morning in New York, and they took me to the Brooklyn Bridge. I’d always wanted to see the Brooklyn Bridge. I’d always thought, Oh, that’s where you fall in love all over again. Thanks to that one pivotal scene an hour and 59 minutes into the first Sex and the City movie wherein Miranda and Steve decide to let back together and leave the past behind, with Al Green’s “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” playing in the background. “Very logical, yet poetic,” Carrie had said about the choice of rendezvous. So when I got there, I expected it to hit me—I thought of those who’d broken my heart, or those I’d hurt, and waited for a little voice inside of me to say, “Hold on.” But then the only little voice I heard was Ellis’s, who was quick to quip, “Hey! This is the bridge from the princess movie!” And then I realized she was talking about a scene from Enchanted, in which Princess Giselle was finally reunited with her Prince Edward—which she’d thought was all she’d ever wanted—until, walking side-by-side with him on this very bridge, she realized it wasn’t the Prince she was in love with, it was McDreamy. And so I stood there and got into thinking: Do I hold on, or do I let go? In life, it’s easy to get stuck between two places—in this case, it was literally, between Manhattan and Brooklyn—or in a place that means two completely different things. And that can be a pretty sticky situation. It can cause you sleepless nights. Luckily, for some of us, we can just shake it off, and do something stylish. It’s OK to lose sleep, anyhow—especially when you’re in the city that never sleeps.
#48: The rooftop at Anne’s Upper East Side apartment (the Wellesley on E 72nd, between 2nd and 3rd Ave., a red-brick 35-story tower). I’d be up here every morning, barely out of REM sleep and not having had coffee yet, just soaking up the sun and the incredible view of the neighboring skyscrapers. Her family have since moved to Brooklyn so Anne could fulfill her dream of sitting on the apotheosis of domestic bliss (well, I kind of like the sound of “Brooklynite gardener,” too), so it’s safe to say I won’t be seeing this rooftop ever again. At least I have pictures that I can look back on.
#49: I hadn’t seen this girl Liz Marsh in, like, 10 years—so you can imagine my surprise when she called and said she had to kidnap me for a day! Always nice to be reunited with old best friends. It’s amazing how she’d managed to stay the same after all those years—same hair, same eye makeup, same laugh, same everything—while I’d become 60 lbs. heavier! Well, her taste in music had changed a bit, but in a good way. Nothing beats driving around West L.A. with Deftones blasting from the car stereo. Speaking of driving, another thing that hadn’t changed about her was, well, her driving! That girl could bust a U-turn (and I don’t mean a legal one) like a gangsta! Luckily, we didn’t get into an accident like that one we got into some 10 years back at the DTM /Reclamation area. I almost got killed, though, when she tried to stuff me with Brazilian barbecue (carneiro, picanha ao alho) at Pampas Grill and “Around the World” combos at Sushi A Go Go—as if I wasn’t fat enough already.
#53: That’s Kloodie, one of my best friends, on her wedding day late last year. I just had to squeeze this photo in. Her wedding dress was the most divine thing I’d ever seen—I mean, look at that! It’s a Jun Escario, by the way, in case you’re wondering.
#56: My friend Janice Larrazabal took me to the Getty to see Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties. It meant so much to me being there and standing face-to-face with the works of the likes of Mary Ellen Mark, James Nachtwey, and Philip Jones Griffiths. Griffiths was my father’s favorite photographer, you see, so, yeah, it meant the world to me. Click here to read more about that experience.
#58: Four months after Michael Jackson’s passing, Angelenos and tourists alike flock to the Staples Center/Nokia Theatre L.A. Live area to pay tribute by dancing to “Thriller.”
#61: On my fourth day in New York I met up with some of my best girl friends from college, Nila Seno, Jam Montecillo and Charmaine Nadela.
#62: After a grueling trip to see Carrie Bradshaw’s brownstone in the Greenwich Village the girls and I rewarded ourselves with these divine cupcakes from the world-famous Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker and W 11th. Divine!
#64: I’d wanted to go back to the beginning, so off we went to the Los Angeles Plaza Historic District at the site of the city’s original settlement (downtown, right by the Union Station and the City Hall). I’d been in this area back in 2008, but never got the chance to see the mural of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles, so I made sure there was no missing it this time around. I said a little prayer, and then went on to explore the colorful Olvera Street. We were right for going on a weekday; we didn’t have to squeeze through crowds of tourists. It was a nice experience: The sound of Mexican guitar and people pronouncing it “Loce Ang-hel-es.”
#64: San Francisco’s J. Boogie on the ones and twos at the Do-Over. A must-do when you’re in L.A. between mid-May and early November, the Do-Over is a Sunday afternoon “backyard barbecue-style” party (they used to throw it over at Crane’s Hollywood Tavern down N El Centro, between Hollywood and Selma, a stone’s throw away from Roscoe’s on Gower, and now the whole thing’s been moved to the Cabana Club a little off Sunset, right by the Arclight). They call it the Do-Over—because, well, as one of the bouncers put it when I asked, “do it once and you’ll want to do it over and over again!” My first Do-Over experience was the bomb, thanks to J. Boogie right here. Famous for his blend of roots reggae, dancehall, Latin hip hop, jazz rap, soul, and new jack swing, he got the crowd swinging nonstop, from Max Romeo’s “Chase the Devil,” to The Fugees’ “Ready or Not,” to Buju Banton’s “Mr. Nine,” to Richie Spice’s “Youth Dem Cold,” to Rich Boy’s “Throw Some D’s,” to Lady G’s “Nuff Respect,” to Tony Rebel’s “Know Jah,” to Q-Tip’s “Breathe and Stop,” to Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day,” to Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” to Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour,” to Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” Next in the lineup was King Britt from Philadelphia, who kept the classics coming. I don’t know about you, but I hadn’t danced to SWV’s “Right Here/Human Nature” in so long, and it felt pretty damn good to be able to do so again. I can’t believe they brought the Do-Over to Manila just last month (July 23)—I would’ve flown! Oh, well, I sent them a Tweet saying they should swing by Cebu the next time they visit this part of the world. Let’s see what happens (or maybe I should just let my event organizer friends to make it happen). #65: Oh, and did I mention the sangria at the-Dover was the shiznit? I could finish 5 carafes of that shit. Well, now I got a deadly stain on my white boat shoes, but I don’t care—I’d like to think of it as a remembrance of a West Coast life well lived.
#66: With my best friends Ronald Conopio and Julie Pongos enjoying supersized mojitos at The Abbey in West Hollywood. We’d dreamt of this very moment when we were kids—all three of us, together again, in the same ZIP Code, particularly one that starts with a 9 and a 0. And so there we were, picking up the pieces, from 90067 to 90069 to 90210. And the coolest thing about it was that none of this was planned! It just happened, just like that, like a comet, like laughter, like forgiveness, and all those other things you can’t explain—a lot like the day we first met some 20 years ago!
#67: It was dineL.A. Restaurant Week. My best friend Chiklet was in the mood for a little sophisticated Spanish, so she took me to The Bazaar by José Andrés at the SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills (no, we were not there to stalk Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom). Loved loved loved the Gazpacho estilo Algeciras, the Tortilla de Patatas, the Papas Canarias, the Jamón Serrano Fermin, the Buñuelos (codfish fritters, honey alioli), the Croquetas de Pollo, and the Beef Hanger Steak (cooked in its own fat and drenched in piquillo pepper sauce). Of course, you don’t need to ask if I liked the ambiance—everything was screaming Philippe Starck.
#69: My goddaughter Tabitha, cutest little thing on earth. This was taken last December when she and her mom Yna Varias came to visit me. I love that she loves to overaccessorize. She has those sunglasses in three different colors.
#72: Me and my best friend Julie with Chad Wolf, frontman of the band Carolina Liar. This was taken after the Rob Thomas/OneRepublic concert at the Gibson Amp, in which they were opening act. Ah, fucking crazy! I got to talk to him and lead guitarist Rickard Göransson and tell them about how their song “California Bound” was, like, my soundtrack for this trip—or, for all my Californian adventures, for that matter! “Well, thanks for finding us, man,” Chad told me as we were about to leave. You should’ve seen me. I was beaming the whole time. Another rock ‘n’ roll dream come true!
#77: One of my favorite couples, my cousin Randy and his beautiful wife Sue, who always make it a point to see me whenever I’m in California. Well, Randy is not really my cousin—our moms are just real good friends, so, there, we’re sorta cousins, which makes Sue my sorta cousin-in-law. LOL. I’d love to photograph them one day, just ‘cause their chemistry is amazing, not to mention they’re both very stylish. The plan is to do a session before their Cebu wedding (yes, they had a California wedding, but Sue wants to have a Cebu wedding soon). Well, Randy is a photographer himself (see samples of his work here), but he can’t do his own pre-second-wedding photos, can he? You guys, this is my sales pitch right here.
#80: My nephew Jamim. Well, his real name is Prince James, but we call him Jamim—a moniker that big sister Oona came up with when should could not pronounce James, and it stuck. He calls me Antle because he can’t pronounce uncle, but that’s alright with me because, really, if you come to think of it, it’s like a portmanteau of aunt and uncle. LOL. He knows alligators are green, and dragons are orange. He loves guitars and drums, and it is my intention to start him early. He smells like Irish Spring, which is why I like to hug him. A lot. He can be clumsy at times, and once he amputated my Deep Space Starscream, but I love him all the same. He is the only human being who sees the good in me, only calling me “Bad!” when I cut his spaghetti into small bits. How nice that somebody in this world is capable of looking at me with a fresh pair of eyes.
#84: My godson Ari is growing up too fast! One day he could barely crawl, and now he was running around The Grove my knees were shaking as I was chasing him around. His mom Cai had asked me to take pictures of him, but it was just diabolically difficult trying to make this one stand still. Note to self: When photographing a child, make sure you’re on Red Bull.
#85 and #86: Couple of photos from my visit to the Kentucky Horse Park. I had promised my cousin Amanda Liok, who loves horses to death, that I was gonna take a lot of photos for her. There’s a certain kind of magic when you look at horses. Maybe it’s their necks. Maybe it’s their manes. Or, could it be their rear ends that remind you of a woman’s behind when she is wearing the right stilettos? I don’t know. I just know it’s magical. But even more enchanting is when you get to know their names. One of the girls I talked to calls her horse Moonshine—who knows if she meant moonlight, or liquor, but this was Kentucky so it’s probably the latter—and that just took my breath away. Another girl calls her horse Alcatraz. Amanda has a couple of horses in her backyard, and all of them have beautiful names: Salsa, Moondance, Taco, Chili. I would love to be able to own a horse one day. Maybe I’ll call it Baroness, after my favorite G.I. Joe character. Or maybe I’ll call it Malibu, after my favorite beach city. Or maybe I’ll call it Lexington, after my favorite summer fling. Or maybe I’ll call it Ava Adore, after my favorite Smashing Pumpkins song. Whatever it is, it definitely won’t be “a horse with no name”—although I kind of love that song, too.
#88, #89 and #90: Who doesn’t love the Santa Monica Pier? I know I do. And not just because this was where Spencer Pratt proposed to Heidi Montag—hey, I was a Baywatch baby long before I became a The Hills hoe. But, of course, it wasn’t the David Charvet types I’d come here to ogle at. Sitting there and watching the birds crisscross the horizon, I thought to myself, “Wow, I would come here everyday if only I could.” There’s this incredibly talented singer-songwriter named Terry Prince (I just recently learned that he has Fililipino roots, too!) who performs there on a regular basis. That definitely added a nice bonus to our visit. I mean, California is the last place you’d expect to find an old soul when it comes to music, and yet here was one guy who was not afraid to share his stories of inspiration through his soulful voice and pared-down melodies. Everyone stopped and listened. My favorite song was “Imagine Love.” I regret not capturing it on video, but, here, someone else did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WZoH2UP4PI. It’s even more beautiful when you’re actually there, I promise. The first few lines of the song goes: “Imagine love/ Imagine heaven here on earth…” I did not need to imagine heaven here on earth. Thanks to the birds, the horizon, and him, I was already standing on it.
Love in the Time of the Camera
My father was a photographer. Well, he was a lot of other things, too—farmer, businessman, practical shooter/handgun enthusiast, tennis player—but it’s the photographer part that’s etched deep in my mind and the first thing I remember whenever I think of him. Was he a professional? Did he have paying clientele? I don’t know. All I know is I grew up tiptoeing around a loft scattered with cameras of all shapes and sizes—Polaroid Sun 600s here, a couple of Leicas there, 35 mm Nikon SLRs everywhere—and other photographic equipment, including tripods, one of them I’m sure I used as hobby horse at one point. When it wasn’t makeshift hobby horse time or Lego time or Atari time I could be found sprawled on the family room hardwood floor, leafing through piles and piles of his prints—some of me and my brothers in various stages of infancy, mostly of my mother in various states of fancy (apparently that was how the courtship had went—my mom skipping and jumping and dancing and laughing and beaming and singing and breathing, and my dad documenting her every move in film). Easily my favorites were his double exposures, and this one print of a chubby-cheeked me as a rotary dial was my favorite thing to bring to show and tell—never failed to elicit ooohs and aaahs from classmates whose baby pictures were humdrum. Of course, toting an instant camera helped boost my schoolyard cred, too. Apart from my dad’s personal work, I was also surrounded by works of genius—he loved collecting documentary photography books, a good chunk of them on war photography, including the first edition of Philip Jones Griffiths’s Vietnam Inc. I suppose there was a darkroom somewhere, possibly tucked between the storage where our plastic model kits sat in various states of disrepair and this room where a small group of his workers packed all sorts of stuff (from chocolate tablets to banana chips), but in the time of A Nightmare on Elm Street you wouldn’t dare consider exploring rooms that were, well, dark, even with trusty old Atari joystick in hand. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d gone looking for it anyway, Freddy Krueger be damned. Oh, well, it bites that you can’t turn back time.
Around the time I turned ten or so I decided I was old enough to get into hobbies outside, well, hobby horses (and Galaga and Donkey Kong Jr.), and taking from my parents’ interests seemed the most practical. From my mom I took her love for music, and went on to learn the piano—the only thing that rivaled the photography books for shelf space was sheet music (her father was a music teacher). For some reason, though, it wasn’t taking pictures that I decided to take on from my dad—instead, I asked him to take me to tennis clinic. I don’t know, perhaps as early as then I’d seemed to know that the former was going to be expensive—a box of Polaroid film alone would cost more than an entire summer of tennis lessons, not to mention they were very hard to come by in the small town where we lived. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d gone for it anyway—if he could afford to buy me some swank racquets there was no reason he couldn’t afford to get me a good beginner’s camera. Oh, well, it bites that you can’t turn back time.
By the time I reached early teenagerhood I stopped playing the piano and dropped the tennis racquets and started toying with my maternal grandfather’s typewriter. I wrote furiously, neurotically, although no one really read my works, save for my maternal grandmother, who would nod in approval every time even when my syntax was flawed and my figures of speech all over the place. Yes, my early works, as you would’ve suspected, were just a tendril short of crap—how deluded was I when I attempted to create, for example, a local version of Sweet Valley High? It all got a little better in time, though, as I slowly outgrew my fondness for implausibly sunkissed blonde twins, and I got published for the very first time in The Philippine Star’s youth lifestyle section when I was 15. Three or so years later I became an editor at a local daily’s youth lifestyle section, and soon after became associate editor and youth section editor at a local magazine. Somewhere in the midst of all this frenzy, I became a stylist, too—I’d figured, to be a credible fashion journalist one had had to walk the talk. This was the time I got to work with some of the most amazing photographers I know. Jon Unson was an incredible to work with—not only did he encourage me to push the envelop in each and every shoot I styled, he also made sure each session was going to be educational (he was always explaining to me what he was doing and what he was aiming to achieve, was always eager to let me in on the planning and conceptualizing stages, and his vast collection of rare art and fashion magazines became my library for a year or so). And then there was Wig Tysmans, whom I’d been commissioned to work with for two fashion editorials for the now-defunct glossy CeBu!, who took us outdoors and gave us a crash course on light and luminance—I remember him talking about “the magical hour,” that sliver of time between when the sun starts to set and when it disappears completely, and I just stood there open-mouthed as it all unfolded, and as he seized ten different hues of a sunset in a single frame. During this period I was living alone, away from family, and being around these gifted and generous people who made work feel like it wasn’t work, and who taught me everything I’d failed to learn from my father, made me feel like I was home. My parents would visit from time to time, and I’d tell my dad about these extraordinarily talented people I was working with and their fascinating craft, and then he’d tell me, “Don’t say I never gave you a camera!” It appeared that he’d given me his Nikon N8008 when he’d arrived from a trip to Vegas in the early ‘90s, but I’d turned it down, saying all I’d wanted was a new typewriter. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d taken it anyway. Oh, well, again, it bites that you can’t turn back time.
It would take another couple of years for me to get my very first camera, a Nikon Zoom 500 or something that looked like it—yes, compact, and secondhand, because I was living from meager paycheck to meager paycheck at the time—which I lost four months later on a trip to Manila to stalk the boundary-pushing streetwear designer Cecile Zamora and the equally fierce stylist/DJ Angelo Villanueva. Two years later I got my first digital camera, a Kodak DC3200—again, compact, and secondhand, because it was all I could afford. Boxy, heavy (it required 4 AA batteries), and in the dullest shade of gray (the color of a battleship), it looked (and, I should add, sounded) more like a toy than a camera, but it did the job pretty well, save for the overactive flash, and so it stuck with me for a good four years—such a trouper, I know! I was gonna say the thing served its purpose as a good personal camera, but it would be remiss in my part if I said I never used it “professionally,” because the truth is I sort of have—in my one-year stint as lifestyle editor for a local weekly in my hometown, we used it for a good number of features that required accompanying portraits, even travelogues. Were they show-stopping images? Well, not quite. But I thought they were pretty decent—for newsprint, at least. And then my dad stepped into the picture. Yes, it was around this time that he started to pay attention to my work; normally, you see, he wouldn’t touch on the subject of my writing, but since this time around my work involved accompanying pictures he began to feel the need to pitch in. “You whites are burnt out—what are you doing about that?” “Watch your lines—composition is important.” “Your photos are almost always published in black and white, so understanding contrast is key.” “Practice a little bit of framing; it can be flattering.” For the first of these feedback sessions I kind of listened, but for what followed I took less and less to heart. Because this was a parent there was this childish tendency for me to suspect that he was just taking advantage of the situation to point out the things I was doing badly. Also, with the dearth of stuff to write about in a small town, I had to focus on digging for stories rather than spend time learning a new craft—besides, I would rationalize, people knew me as a writer, not as a photographer or art director, so they wouldn’t care if the visuals were mediocre as long as the writing was pretty damn good. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d paid close attention to what he’d had to say, hung on to every word, taken down notes. Oh, well, it bites that you can’t turn back time.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2008 that I learned to recognize the value of photography as a tool to help me see the world and tell stories in ways that could be markedly different from the written word. I was on my very first trip out of the country, and was therefore saddled with the task to document every little experience for those waiting at home. “Your camera ready?” my dad had asked days before my flight out. Naturally, I’d assured him, two cameras, in fact. “You sure you don’t need a new one?” he’d asked, and to this I’d shaken my head, and he’d said OK, fine—knowing me, he’d probably had a sneaking suspicion I’d only put them in my checklist to make sure something was there to document my outfit opportunities, anyways, so he’d fought the urge to push. And, true to form, during my first few days in Los Angeles, all I did was shop and have photos of me in my new clothes taken, under the false illusion that maybe a profile picture of me wearing some Urban Outfitters and against some kickass stencil graffiti down N La Brea would land me a spot in the MySpace Muses section of WhoWhatWear.com (and how depressing is that, right?). And then the day came when everyone I knew was too busy to show me around, and so I was left with no choice but to go around on my own, walking (yes, walking, a breach in convention by New Wave standards since Missing Persons had declared that “nobody walks in L.A.”) a half mile from my friend’s Wilshire Center neighborhood to Melrose, and another two miles down Melrose looking for the People’s Revolution offices to stalk Kelly Cutrone. With no one there to take pictures of me, for the first time in a long time my camera was turned away from, well, me and actually saw the world. Melrose, particularly that section between La Brea and Fairfax, was quintessential, dead-on L.A.—equal parts offbeat and classic, crass and urbane, languid and dynamic, cluttered and tidy, unworldly and worldly, it was like being caught between two places, definitely unlike anything I’d ever seen in the movies or television. Falling more and more in love with the city with every step I took, I yanked my camera out of my tote and just fired away, taking pictures of every nook and cranny, of every hustle and bustle, of every passerby suspecting or unsuspecting. I snapped and snapped, more obsessively by the minute, for the record, for me to look back on, for others who’d ever wondered. It was an epiphany of sorts: Here was a prompt, convenient, all-encapsulating way to document—a pen and journal, albeit brave, wouldn’t have sufficed. So I didn’t get to spot Ms. Cutrone, but I stumbled upon a new hobby—not bad at all. Instant-replaying my shots as I called it a day, waggling at the few hits and snorting at the hundreds of misses, I thought of how much painless all of this would’ve been had I taken my dad up on his offer to buy me a better camera. But, oh, well, I was here, and there was no turning back the hands of time.
One of the last conversations I had with my father was about cameras. I was home visiting, having just returned from the City of Angels, and was showing him my shots from Melrose, a.k.a. my feeble attempt at street/documentary photography. They were nowhere as good as his shots from Vegas/Reno from years back, of course—or any of his shots, for that matter—but he gave me his stamp of approval, and declared I was ready to graduate from point-and-shoot to SLR. At first the idea of a heavy black box that needed to have its own bag (or to be carried around your neck) and that required careful handling and that entailed a number of accessories frightened me, but then I figured, hey, if I had to jump at this I had to go all out. So I told him I was willing to take him up on his offer to get me a new camera this time, if it still stood, and, to my dismay, he said yes, but on one condition: it had to be film-based. “Do they even sell those still?” I whimpered. But then again I’d seen it coming. The thing about my dad was he kicked it old school, tenaciously, almost to a fault—never got tired of his Jeep CJ, for example, which he’d had since his adolescent years, in favor of compact cars or other more sophisticated forms of transportation. And so it was no surprise that he wasn’t a huge fan of digital photography. With film, he said, “you are forced to have this discipline, to exercise restraint, and it gives you room to really study your bad shots—unlike digital, where you can take a hundred shots of a single frame and just discard the 99 that are bad and keep the one that’s good.” He had a point, but I remained obstinate. “If you want to be good at this, you have to learn it the hard way,” he’d added. After much prodding, though, he agreed to meet me halfway—i.e., I was to get myself a DSLR body, and he would buy me all the lenses that I wanted. Sounded like a deal to me. I was excited that I was about to start a new creative journey. And he was kind of thrilled, too—if not at the idea that, finally, he and I had something in common (after failed attempts to get me interested long enough in tennis, or at all in trips to the farm, family business stuff, or pistols), then at least at the idea that his prodigal progeny was going to be needing to see him more frequently than the usual twice-a-year. Am I making this stuff up—the part about him being kind of thrilled? People are going to ask that, knowing my father was nothing if not hard to read. Well, the answer is no. Before we said goodbye, I asked for a photo with him, which my friend Carlo took. My dad, he was never fond of being in front of a camera, always preferred to stand behind it—he was never a smiley person, too, and was always stiff, even when the situation called for one to be tender. But he said yes to this one photo, and even managed to put on a half-smile.
Little did I know that that was going to be the last photo of me and my father. He would pass away, in a freak motor accident, a little over three months later, just three days shy of my thirtieth birthday, which was when I’d originally intended to get myself a present in the form of the camera body that we’d talked about. It’s sad when the cookie crumbles, but even more heartbreaking when your world falls apart. In the wake of his death it all hung like a dark cloud over me, the promises that never came to fruition—not just the more prosaic ones like the camera situation, but the graver things, too, like my promise to be a good son and a good brother, and everything else in between. I began to wonder how the feminist artist Kiki Smith, daughter of American modernist sculptor Tony Smith, must have felt when her works were put alongside a retrospective of her father’s, some twenty years after his passing—“I remember being embarrassed because he had a beard or drove strange cars,” she had been quoted as saying. In my eulogy for my dad I touched on the subject of my self-imposed semi-estrangement from him and the rest of my family. It was no secret that I had distanced myself from and turned my back on him in more ways than one, and I would reason that that was because I was trying to be my own person, but, really, the truth was I terrified that his idiosyncrasies would rub off on me—not knowing that the more I’d ran the more I’d taken parts of him with me, and I had only been wasting my time, throwing away what had promised to be a relationship inundated by creativity. Tearfully I expressed my regret in front of friends and family. But no amount of tears could turn back time. All that was left to do was to move forward, and hope that, no matter how tragic things had turned out, a wonderfully consoling outcome was waiting for me somewhere, somehow. The good son and good brother parts I am still working on up to this very day, as I am writing this. The camera, though, I got to pick up last year, some fourteen months after his passing, and it’s never left my side ever since—a part of my father that has stuck with me, and that is going to be stuck with me, hopefully for a very long time. Of course, the aforementioned last snapshot of me and him is stuck with me, too—as a soothing reminder that, while we are not able to turn back the hands of time, at least some things can be, well, frozen in time.
I guess that’s what’s good about love in the time of the camera.
It hasn’t been easy having to learn the ropes on my own. Sure, there are people around me who’ve been doing this a long time, but every time I push my luck a door is slammed on my face. No hard feelings, especially since I’ve come to understand that times have changed, and are changing—advancement in digital photography has made the craft accessible to almost everyone, and as the landscape becomes oversaturated people are looking for more and more ways to stand out and be cut above the rest, and unfortunately for some one way to do that is to hold back on the sharing. The deplorable part is when people accuse you of being a “copycat,” thinking they own the craft just because they happened to pick up a camera a few years before you could do so yourself. I was unlucky enough to have undergone such travail. There were days it would get so bad and I’d find myself giving up cold turkey. But somehow during these days memories of my father would manage to manifest, and so I’d pick my head up. Case in point: Just a couple of months ago I was in L.A. visiting my sister, and I was this close to selling my camera to a friend from college, but then I made a quick trip to the Getty, and at the time Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties was on exhibition, featuring the works of the likes of Mary Ellen Mark, James Nachtwey, and Philip Jones Griffiths, and then I was brought face-to-face with a print of Griffiths’s seminal image of a Marine talking to a Vietnamese peasant girl in a paddy field, my dad’s favorite image from Vietnam Inc. And just like that I decided to keep the camera. It’s kind of a bittersweet thing, really, how he’s no longer here to teach or guide me, and yet it’s like he’s all around me, just pushing.
You might be wondering why I chose to tell this story to inaugurate my blog. Well, the principal reason is a rather simple one: Today is Father’s Day, and what better way to celebrate than by paying homage to my old man? There is a collateral reason, though, that I feel needs to go on record. You see, ever since I got a camera I have been getting a lot of flak from friend and foe alike, saying that I only got interested in photography because of a boy. While I will admit that, for a time there, I was head over heels with a guy who happens to be a photographer—and a very, very talented one at that—he wasn’t, isn’t and will never be the reason that I got myself into this. Does this boy inspire me? Well, yes. But then so do a lot of other stuff, like the Pacific Coast Highway, grunge, horse names, Beat poetry, birds, Catherine Deneuve, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. And that’s just talking about right now. Maybe tomorrow it’s going to be, well, “Maybe Tomorrow” by Stereophonics. My point being that, while inspiration is a critical part of every creative process, it is often fleeting, temporary, and can be substituted at a snap of your fingers. A birthright, however, is steadfast and headstrong, has no hiding place, and is not something you can just shake off or put away. Trust me, I am tempted to attribute this whole thing to affairs of the heart, but there’s no denying that there’s no affair quite like a family affair. And so, once and for all, to dispel the rumors and to disabuse some of you of that notion, let it be known that I’m doing this not because of a boy, but because of a man.
This blog is dedicated in loving memory of my father, Jose Francisco Serafica Kangleon. I am probably never going to be as good as him—or anyone in this field, for that matter. I am probably never going to get people to stop and say oooh and aaah. I am probably never going to get people to show some respect. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a try. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop soldiering on. Some people are going to do a cursory glance-over at my work, dismiss it as amateur, perhaps even make ominous forecasts about it, but that’s alright. Because maybe it is amateur, maybe terribly so even. I will come clean and admit that I’ve never attended a single photography workshop, that there’s no more technical know-how in me than in an intermediate-level child photographer (I mean, I look at my lens blower and I am baffled by it!), and that I do not have the discipline or patience to organize my camera bag or my mood boards or my shooting schedule. More often than not I rely on whim and not on white balance, forget to mind my composition in favor of caprice, attach importance to accidents vs., say, aperture. Pretty clumsy, you might say. Like on this one late afternoon two years ago, in the fall, I was walking towards the corner of Wilshire and S Manhattan Pl looking for The Wiltern (to see if I could score tickets to an Aimee Mann/Fountains of Wayne gig), and I stopped dead on my tracks and pointed my camera to the sky upon remembering it was my dad’s birthday, his first since his passing. The resulting picture was not of his face among the clouds, of course—it was of a flock of birds, gracefully gliding through rays of the California sunset, almost Hitchcockian, top-to-bottom surreal. Is that sort of stuff amateur? Maybe so. I don’t know. All I know is that it’s magical. And I have my old man to thank for it.
