Fifteen Frames

And the Memories Surrounding Them

On my last visit to Manila in 2008, My father appeared in the lanai one morning carrying a huge box. "Here," he said, dropping it on the floor. "Go through your old things and throw away what you don't need. I want to purge the storage." I nodded. He turned and walked back to the house.

I stared at the box for a long time. I wasn't prepared to revisit my past, especially when it was presented as a task to check off a to-do list. Not wanting to disappoint him, I reluctantly opened the flaps and found folders and envelopes—everything from my college years at De La Salle University.

Most of what I'd kept were test prints and multiple versions from school assignments. I also found slides and color negatives stuck together after years of storage in Manila's humidity. As I rummaged through the pile, terrible pictures and badly printed images stared back at me. It was one of those moments when I realized how far I'd traveled.

I threw away most of the contents but kept one contact sheet for sentimental reasons—the very first roll I'd shot, processed, and printed in black and white.

First Contact Sheet, September 1987.

Only 15 frames survived out of the 24 or 36 roll. What happened to the rest? Did I not finish the roll to meet my deadline, or did I shoot the remaining frames with my lens cap on? My exposures were also erratic. I had no sense of composition. I honestly had no clue what I was doing.

I remember sweating in the dark, rolling my first film onto the metal reels. What relief I felt when I pulled it out of the steel tank during the washing stage and discovered nothing had stuck together.

There were two photography instructors at that time. I happened to be in Ms. Lee’s class. She was kind during critiques and gave us slack, knowing these were our first attempts. The other half of my batchmates, however, got eviscerated. In the gang darkroom, everyone was frantically printing their re-dos and talking about Sir Manny tearing someone's contact sheet right in front of the class, commenting acerbically that it was so gray "as if the pollution of Manila went through it." He was Simon Cowell before Simon Cowell was even a household name—tough, but with standards that pushed us all to think critically and do better work.

Then there was Mang Norman—the camera equipment and darkroom caretaker. He was a force to be reckoned with. He'd nap well past the time he was scheduled to open the place after lunch. If we banged on the door, he ignored us. He took his sweet time and had a scowl on his face when he finally let us in. There was also talk (and I don't know if it was ever verified) that if someone accidentally left their photo paper behind in the darkroom, he would claim he never saw it. Then a few days later, we'd hear that he'd sold a pack to another student. He had no patience and was always curt, as if he perpetually woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

After that trimester, I'd gotten myself together—achieving decent exposures on every roll and producing acceptable-looking contact sheets and prints. By the time Sir Manny offered his advanced photography course, I'd braced myself and was ready to enroll. I don't remember if there were other photography courses after that, but I do know that I chose to do a black and white photo essay about Philippine cinema for my final thesis, with him as my advisor.

For me, the real education in seeing how light falls, in composition and framing, came from studying the photography monographs at the library connected to the US Embassy. There, I immersed myself in books by Alfred Stieglitz, Arnold Newman, W. Eugene Smith, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn. I got a library card and brought those books home multiple times so I could study them. At that age, I absorbed everything like a sponge!

So, a year and a half later, these are some of the more decent images produced for my thesis with Sir Manny’s guidance:

Film Director Peque Gallaga and 1st Assistant Barney Molina on the film set of Isang Araw, Walang Diyos,

Production Designer Placido “Don” Escudero.

Peque Gallaga, Don Escudero, Lorna Tolentino and Tita Reuben.

Peque Gallaga and Jose Javier Reyes at Regal Films’ Post Production studio.

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