Parallax Photo recently attended the Objectifs Documentary Award exhibition and talks in Singapore. Three works form the exhibition: Yong Li Xuan (Singapore) and Jomar Tingson (The Philippines) are recipients of the Objectifs Documentary Award 2022’s Emerging Category and are presenting their projects Fighting Demons and Ang Palaboy at ang Tatlong Krus (The Vagrant and the Three Crosses) respectively. Irene Barlian (Indonesia), with her project Rise: a Land of the Sea was the Open Category recipient.
Fighting Demons addresses mental health struggles and stigma, and is relayed through the story of Ashley, a 22-year-old student who was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in 2019. Yong Li Xuan developed a close bond with Ashley, and this is represented through the way in which Ashley’s agency in the project is foregrounded, resulting in a collaborative narrative portrait. Read Yong’s personal statement about the project.
Yong is clear about Fighting Demons being a “photojournalism project,” and dives into the differences between journalism and advocacy, despite the project having very much an advocate’s impetus. When asked what drove her to begin this work, she responded “so my parents would understand,” and was momentarily overcome by the weight of her truth.
In Rise: a Land of the Sea, Irene Barlian immerses us “in the axis of human agency and the broader issues of the climate crisis and all other infrastructural recourse that besiege villages in Pekalongan and Cirebon” along the northern coast of Java, Indonesia.
Barlian’s work also tackles a complex subject, and also shows us an intimate view of what it is like to deal with a situation that can make day to day living an uphill struggle, depicting communities that are caught between environmental degradation and economic hardship. The work includes such striking images as a woman casually sitting on a sofa in her flooded home, her feet immersed in the incoming seawater. Another shows the sea crashing in through the doorway of a house, a forceful reminder of the displacement environmental changes can bring. Barlian’s evocative observations are given room to breathe in Siddharta Perez’s curation of her work in Objectifs’ Chapel Gallery.
There is a contemplative stillness in the photography as it arrests moments of activity and action and this tension is allowed to hold our attention. The need to understand what is happening to these communities, alongside the lack of the normal textual descriptions forces the viewer to search for the information in the pictures themselves. Captions do exist for the images in this series and Perez has translated them into a visual signifier of the rising waters, obscuring their role as an explainer of the images and again forcing us to turn our attention back to Barlian’s photography to search for meaning.
Parallax asked Irene Barlian privately after her talk, how and why she came to start Rise: A Land of the Sea. The answer was simple: women are underrepresented in the solutions to the problems that affect them, and she, being a part of these communities, wanted to bring attention to that.
Both Yong Li Xuan and Irene Barlian brought up the issue of Activism & Advocacy vs Journalistic Objectivity in their talks. While both photographers clearly have a point of view on the issues they are documenting – concerns around the stigma of mental health, and inaction on climate change – they sought to distinguish between the two activities.
This perhaps points to the range of views on the purpose of documentary and journalism, with the stance of objectivity, taken to an extreme in the “view from nowhere” which is often at odds with the tradition of “campaigning journalism”. In today’s world of polarised viewpoints, the nuance that allows for both objective fact and an interpretative advocacy, is something Parallax believes those of us engaged with this work need to champion. That is not to say that we need to take on all the roles required to address the issues raised in our work, but we will find ourselves called upon to engage with those issues, and it is then up to us to decide where and how we do this. Yong Li Xuan and Irene Barlian’s work clearly takes a stance, and sometimes we are called upon to reinforce the call to action that our work is acting to achieve.
While both of these stories may be said to be strong examples of observational documentary, Jomar Tingson’s Ang Palaboy at ang Tatlong Krus, which began in part as a documentation of the performances of The Centurion Original, a local theatre group that performs the dramatization of the Passion of Christ each year during Holy Week. The project becomes deeply subjective as he explores his own family history. In overlapping his own personal journey, photography then acts as a mediator.
The materiality of photography is very much evident here, with the black and white highlighting the formal aspects of the portraiture and light, motion, spontaneity and complex compositional techniques, both deliberate and serendipitous very much in evidence. Combined with the collaborative text by Dennese Victoria the project takes on a catechistic form, with the answers – like the religious doctrines it borrows this from – often leading to further questions.
During his artist talk, Jomar Tingson noted that Ang Palaboy at ang Tatlong Krus (The Vagrant and the Three Crosses) was, among other things, a “search for tenderness.” It was pleasantly surprising to hear a man verbalise an uncomplicated desire for such an intimate thing in the company of strangers.
In contemporary life, men—and women, for that matter—use words like “kindness,” “compassion” or “empathy.” Easily defined, socially reinforced in a range of contemporary topics from mental health to leadership, and distanced enough from the intimate to be valid in public discussion. But “tenderness” is a word found in close settings with music, poetry… or maybe alcohol. And yet, that’s what we heard from each photographer.
One thing that struck us in the approaches of the three photographers as they presented their work in conversation with mentor Muhammad Fadli, Objectifs own Chelsea Chua and curator Siddharta Perez was how the language we speak affects the language we see in.
With Perez and Tingson hailing from the Philippines, Fadli and Barlian Indonesian, and Chua and Yong Singaporean, it would have perhaps been interesting to hear these different voices together in open conversation and hear more around where their projects and approaches overlap and where they differ, both in approach – photographically and personally, and in subject matter.
All three projects document issues through lenses that come from a space of intimacy for each photographer. But all deal with wide ranging issues — the climate emergency, postcolonial identity, destigmatising mental health. They are global issues presented in Southeast Asian contexts, documenting challenges particular to the region and locality these projects are situated in. We all encounter these problems in varying intensities. The first step is to understand the myriad ways in which they manifest for communities everywhere, so that we may all have a chance to engage with them together.
Rise: A Land of the Sea, Ang Palaboy at ang Tatlong Krus and Fighting Demons is showing at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film until 7 May 2023.
