A Monday surprise from Roland Rabang of Baguio

Fortnight
By Roland P. Rabang
Visually written


Skimming through the pages of Babeth Lolarga’s brand new book, “Catholic and Emancipated”- a collection of “personal chronicles” it says in the cover - I was drawn to a particular essay with the title, “The Marriage of Text and Images.”

It warranted a second glance because I have read the material before. Of course some of us who follow Babeth in her blog www.brooksidebaby.blogspot.com or in publications, might have read not only this essay, but also other essays that comprise the entire compilation which are either blog entries or published articles.

But my encounter with this particular essay was neither. Babeth emailed this to me in 2008 when I was working with a paper, and struggling on the topic of photography and photographers. She good-naturedly provided me with this gem of a material which talks about the relationship between the visual and language, and concludes that images are formed within our consciousness whenever we appropriate language.

So we call an object “table” not because it exists as a table but because we all agree that it is a table. This is what Babeth meant when she quoted Braque as saying, “Meaning arises through agreed-upon convention, not through likeness.”

It was when I got here - which is not even halfway through the essay - that my nose started to bleed. It brought me back to that period when I had to look at photography beyond the creative pleasure that the medium gives to an enthusiast.

If Babeth talked about photography in her piece, it was only a fleeting reference to a multi-media exhibit that also involved the written word. No doubt, Babeth is not only a writer, she is also a painter which explains her enduring romance with the visual as well as the written form.

As I structured her piece into my work, I thought about painting and photography and how both exist as media that represents the world around us. With photography as reference, I tried to look at the work of the painter and realized that in a way, the process is like photography except that the painter has all the time to bring the image from his consciousness on to the canvass, and that is when the vision of the painter becomes apparent. On the other hand, the photographer works with exposures of one second up to the fastest shutter speed of less than a second without suffering reciprocity failure.

This is not a discussion of who does a better job, the painter or the photographer, but a look into that “time” in which images are created. Painting and photography are both interpretative media and there is no denying the vision of the artist once a painting is completed. But Chuck Close says this about photography: “Here’s the dilemma and the strength of photography. It is the easiest medium in which to be competent, but it is the hardest medium in which to have a personal vision.”

With painting, there is a purposeful physicality: the movement of the artist’s hand from brush to canvass. A photographer works only with fleeting time, perhaps 1/125th of a second on the street, and a latent image in the case of film. Thus, everything must unravel in the photographer’s head because the physical act of tripping the shutter is merely fleeting; but at that instant before the shutter is pressed, the vision must already exist in the photographer’s head.

But this process is not well-defined prompting arguments, among them Walter Benjamin’s, that photography is merely “mechanical reproduction.” Not by accident though, this concept gave birth to one of photography’s enduring mission: documentary. It found its place in journalism, and was called photojournalism.

That said, however, here’s another nosebleed thought. There is “built-in” interpretation even in “objective” written reports. Photojournalism inevitably follows this principle. Worse, it is mute, which is why it is, as Babeth would say, “married” into the written word. Simply put, in journalism, the photograph has a caption.

Interpretation is subjective, thus encounters with photography since the exciting century of its invention will always carry with it the question: does documentary trump art, or does art trump documentary?

There is no shortage of words used to respond to this question which makes this marriage between text and images exciting, confounding, infuriating and yes, sensual. This is, I heard it once said, “textual erotica” at its best.

Reprinted from Baguio Chronicle where the author writes a column

Photo of book cover "grabbed" from RUDI TABORA's Facebook photo collection

The book Catholic and Emancipated is published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House as part of its Personal Chronicles series.