My piece on Sonny Yabao's Somnambulist is out at Invisible Photographer Asia:
The boy waits behind a rusty blue gate. He wants to step out
but he hesitates. He shields himself, perhaps from the blinding yellow sun or
from the jolt of a speeding car, from a stranger, or from nothing at all. He
has Down’s syndrome. Or maybe he does not. It's not clear.
This is the world that Sonny Yabao sees. Here, the
grass stretch as far as the eye can see. Some are lush green, some are
sun-dried and some are burning; there are billows of thick smoke spiraling
behind the Gods. Three dead chickens hang upside down from a tree as the blue
sky fades into an eerie shade of gray. There are children sleeping on the
pavement, sacks of trash beside them. They don't seem to mind the pools of mud,
the soot or the noise of passing cars, not these children. Little angels -- all
four of them -- their wings spread out, walk side by side on a mountain of
garbage. It is the same place where a dead baby lay in a tattered carton of
Lucky Me noodles. People call it a God-forsaken land.
It is a world of the living and the dead, the virgins and
the lustful, the dying and the newborns, the wealthiest and the poorest of the
poor. It is a world sometimes devoid of beauty; at times dirty, painful
and harsh.
But Yabao has no messianic delusions that he can change all
that. He doesn’t even attempt to do so.
"I am not here to change the world," he says.
To him, it’s simply to see life as it happens, and at the
stillest moment in this chaotic world, he stands with his camera and captures
it when it happens.
“It’s really very simple.”
But what Yabao does not realize is that nothing is simple in
his photographs. Through his images, he unwittingly takes his audience in a
disturbing, riveting and haunting journey of finding the surreal in the most
mundane of things. And to see the absurd when there seems to be none or to hear
the slightest hissing sounds when there are only dog whispers. The
experience, to say the least, is intravenous and at times visceral.
His images are at best, a blending of reality and magic
realism and certainly more than mere documentary. He sees something more in the
most normal of scenes and waits for that exact moment when it happens - be it
the piercing gaze of a woman in a bright crimson loose-fitting garment or that
fraction of a second when she gestures her right hand as she raises a piece of
white cloth behind her.
Here the idea of the decisive moment, mastered by French
photographer Cartier-Bresson, comes in. It is part of Yabao’s driving force as
he attempts to capture what he sees.
It is never deliberate but Yabao, much like Kafka or Garcia
Marquez, enthralls his audience to take a second look at everyday life and see
the magic that is woven in between the days and the hours.
And to realize in the process that nothing is what it seems
to be; not now, not today, not tomorrow or the day after. Because that is what
it means to be alive.
Somnambulist is Yabao’s collection of these moments,
captured in between places, in between full consciousness and dreamlike state,
in between dreams and nightmares and in the middle of years and years of
treading the strange and lonely road.
But little do many people know that Yabao is an accidental
photographer. He is first of all, a writer, an essayist and a poet who wrote
love poems for beloveds, real or imagined. He pursued a diploma in English but
changed his mind. He painted landscapes of his small hometown in Samar.
And more.
One day, in his 20s, a friend gave him a job in a small
portrait studio in Cubao. He experienced the magic in the dark room and by
taking photographs he saw the world like never before.
He took portraits of women, forlorn and weary; from
broken-hearted mistresses to eager brides and those in between. He captured the
smiles of young girls in pink pigtails who sat in the studio. He took photographs
of celebrities, movie stars, starlets and action heroes.
He covered news – poverty, disasters, wealth and Imelda
Marcos, too. Because magazine editors from all over the world assigned him to
do so.
Shooting Madame was both a privilege and a curse. He was
there when the other half of the conjugal dictatorship shook hands with
Chairman Mao Tze Tung in the China of the past, a country nobody dared to go at
the time. He was there when she met with Yasser Arafat and many others he opts
not to name.
He was there when the woman with 3,000 pairs of shoes spent
hours on end in an airport of another country to buy not one bottle of Joy but
boxes of the 1929 perfume, considered to be one of the greatest fragrances of
all time.
But Imelda never liked him as her photographer because the
woman wanted blinding lights flashing endlessly every time she walked the red
carpet. Yabao never indulged her even if it was a sin to say no to the
Steel Butterfly. He did not use the flash.
“She never liked me because I do not use a flash,” he says.
There is no need to do so, he insists.
Indeed, in the world that Yabao sees, there’s no need to
exaggerate, no need for hyperboles. He simply captures life as it is. The magic
lies in the way he sees beyond what is ordinary, as it happens, when it
happens.
And at that exact moment, between dimensions and split
seconds, Yabao freezes the time. The result is a visually stunning moving world
captured in a huge backdrop of truth and magic realism, of fantasy and reality,
of the daily grind and its parallel universe.
