Elevating the ordinary: ‘Mundane’ shots at ILOMOCA

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Much has been written about photography and to dwell on the matter would result to another tedious panegyric of its merits as artform. Simply put, the camera lens has simplified the task of the pencil and brush, doing so with a practical universality that verges on the instantaneous. Little escapes its apparent omniscience. With a click and a flash, it democratizes both potential subject and potential practitioner – and in a city brimming with photogenic material and one that abounds with shutterbugs, how do fledgling lensmen enter the scene and find their niche among kindred lovers of the captured image?

This proposition was put to test with the current exhibit at the main hall of ILOMOCA. The evening of June 5 drew a crowd intent on perusing Mundane, a curation of photographs by father-son tandem Malbar Ferrer and Magin Benedict Ferrer. Exhibited with the support of the Gilopez Kabayao Foundation, Inc., the collection of developed images wove through vignettes of the ordinary and the quotidian. Far from the spectacle and histrionics identified with ‘iconic’ photography, we find in their shots a suggestion of how mundanity underlines the authenticity that gives art its soul.

But what is truly mundane? Our perceptions of simplicity or bland normality wax subjective – one man’s discarded scrap is another’s medium of aesthetic expression; the daily tedium of routine may become a purveyor of great narrative to the creative. From its etymology, one would define the word as something of this world; thus, it may cover and involve all manners and means of things. This open catholicity of the exhibit’s title invites the viewer to contemplate the ebb and flow of interactions and the environments where these occur.

And so, we search closely for these in their photographs. There is the guileless geometry of curves and lines, ever repeating in patterns of light and shadow. There is the innocence of human faces and forms, framed as portraits yet without loss of their personalities. There are the austere rhythms of architecture framing human acts and forms. There are the spontaneous moments where nature becomes backdrop to the foibles and antics of company and recreation – or the gravitas of toil and prayer. There are the vibrant colors contrasted with saturnine shades, exuding in their contrasts a simple retelling of fleeting instances of humanity caught between time and space.

These are things and circumstances of the world. They go unnoticed for the most part, as is the order of things. That they have been captured and preserved through the camera lens – in the mundane and blunt extempore of their imagery – is an attempt to memorialize the ordinary.

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Then again, all art is a riposte to the ordinariness of things. It defies the cold conventionality of our encounters in life by transmuting and elevating these to something the ages might consider as the Good and the Beautiful. It goes against the logic of common sense by providing its participants different perspectives that may seem absurd to the conformist. But it is the way with all artworks and forms: contra mundum, as National Artist Nick Joaquin would have it – against the world.

In a paradoxical sense, the photographs currently on display takes this countercurrent through further retrograde. The shots of Ferrer père et fils offer another viewpoint of harking back to the simple things, and framing and preserving them through a lens that appreciates the stark and the somber. No great panoramic scenes, no dramatic poses: only the unadorned candor that drifting life has to offer.

Drop by the museum one of these days and peruse the photos. Soak in the images and geometries, the portraits and personas, the soft play of lights and shadows. There is beauty – great and profound – to be found in the mundane.

(The writer is a humanities teacher in one of the private schools of the city.)