When images breathe: Dr. Ferrer’s photographs in ILOMOCA

Last Friday, the walls of ILOMOCA’s Hulot Gallery were once more teeming with blown-up prints of photographs. These were the shots of Dr. Malbar Ferrer. Earlier this year, he teamed up with his son in a rather modest photo exhibit displayed at the museum’s lobby, one that explored the nature of mundanity. Now, he followed up this interrogation of ordinariness with an aspiration (pun intended).

‘Breath.’ Simply that noun; it is not even an imperative or a descriptor. The exhibit’s title evokes a basic condition and a basic necessity. The punctuated word further draws forth a certain shortness to it, as if one is running out of breath — or in the long run, the exhausted gasp of life itself. Exhibit notes writer Jose Roy Paniza aptly anchors it to its Latin parallel: a physical manifestation of the spirit and its interactions. Then again, what we draw in from what surrounds us and what we exude make up the contemplation of our existence and our zeitgeist (spirit of the times), the likes of which are so easily captured and preserved through the camera lens.

In Dr. Ferrer’s photographs, this capture and preservation lean towards the introspective and personal. Referencing the curatorial notes, we might be moved to appraise them as a visual paraphrase to the French author, that what more than meets the eye constitutes the essential and the meaningful.

Observably, patterns repeatedly permeate the photos, as if to echo the continuous act of respiration. These are seen as arboreal rows, sedate in their unmoving columns; as the quiet consistency of the lines of a pedestrian lane; in the zebra stripes arrayed in the equine crowd gathered at some waterhole; in the monumental splendor of towering fountains of water; in the inscribed characters written as scripture on an ancient page; in the webbed radii of tree branches and twigs assuming the look of capillaries or nerve endings. The rhythm in the images marks time, as if some visual journal log of encounters and experiences.

This austere simplicity of patterns is further emphasized by the monochrome use of hues. Not something fundamentally new: Ansel Adams maximized it in the primitive camera to great effect. In all appearances, Dr. Ferrer understands this demure allure of chiaroscuro. The choice of a limited palette provides his photos with a certain seriousness redolent of life as details and as the big picture. It emphasizes what needs to be seen: the minutiae of leaves, the undulating contours of a hilly landscape, the play of light and shadows on a cyclist traversing the road, the solid lattice frames holding window-glass. Again, the details and the big picture.

Still, this picture of life does not necessarily translate to the grandiose and ostentatious. One’s attention is easily caught by framed shots of spindly and fragile branches set against a blazing white sky; dotting this minimalist immensity are small birds caught in flight or at rest. Somehow, there is somewhat of a haiku hidden in these pictures — somewhere in that contrast of light and lines, there is poetry meant to be uttered in a single breath.

The use of color is likewise employed for the dramatic. Portraits abound: one is confronted with faces of all expressions, both human and animal — careworn, jocund, snide, tender, among others. Muted, they seem to converse with the viewer. While these figures are transfixed in their poses, the photos and their colorful vibrance endow them with a certain immutability: their stories are here to stay, breathing in their insentient way.

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In taking aim at its subject, the camera insists as an individualistic medium of art, capturing only what the photographer intends to see. Paradoxically, what it captures and displays are scenes belonging to the rest of the world. As such, the art form aspires to a respiratory process, a give-and-take between inspiration and image.

Can we consider Dr. Ferrer’s exhibit autobiographical? We can push forward the idea. If it is understood to be a visual journal, then it achieves that purpose. What is the photograph if not the encounter and the experience preserved by the materiality of light and ink forced on a surface?

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