A picture paints a thousand words. This longstanding adage is epitomized by the eloquent photographs of avant-garde lenswoman Wawi Navarroza. Each of her beautifully composed pieces, her early black-and-white works in particular, seemingly divulge stanzas and verses to poems that talk liberally about the meaning of life and its alluring and sinister mysteries. It seems that each of them call to mind passages from a well-written book philosophizing and musing about darkness, isolation, shadows, the surreal, the rare, the tragic, the shocking, and the impossibly beautiful. Immortalized in archival paper, her anthology of pictures emerges like an appropriate visual paean of her heart and soul.

Maybe it was Navarroza’s early love for literature that prompted her to develop and perfect her aesthetic sensibilities. But audiences here and abroad would not have had the chance to see the artist’s knack for photography had it not been for one twist of fate. And it was her professor-artist-curator Judy Freya Sibayan who was responsible for that.

During her college days at the De La Salle University-Manila, Navarroza clearly expressed her interest in filmmaking, thinking she was to become someone who wrote scripts after graduation but only to be disappointed in the end, or so she thought.

“I was studying in a communication arts program at that time. There were three specializations you had to take before you finish your course and these tracks were journalism, filmmaking, and photography. I tried to make good grades in film because I found that I liked how they are made. I also worked no end because [celebrated screenwriter] Doy del Mundo was one of my film professors. But during deliberation, she [Sibayan] tracked me into photography,” Navarroza reminisces.

She continues, “I protested and said I didn’t like it. She told me, ‘No, I’m a fascist. You’re going to photography.’ But I think she did that with only good intentions. She kind of spelled it out what I didn’t know at that time. In short, I didn’t really imagine that this was what I was going to be doing but when I found it, it fit perfectly. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

True enough, from that point onwards, Navarroza looked at the medium in a very different perspective. The lure of photography was too much a glare and dazzle for her not to notice. “The first seduction was the darkroom. It was like magic,” Navarroza reveals. “Photography was a medium that made me stop and enjoy the whole process of making and taking the image. I was also rebelling from the medium so I tried experimenting with film.”

The 30-year-old’s experimentations such as manipulating monochrome film by hand resulted in internationally and critically acclaimed oeuvres, which have already been exhibited in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Netherlands, and France among others. Her melancholic, lyrical, and ominous works have also given her much credit to be invited to conduct a workshop at the International Summer School of Photography in Russia along with other four noted photographers.

The artist’s works, as said earlier, were ethereal, elaborate, and ephemeral—the “photographic extensions of her philosophies.”

But Navarroza has stepped rather boldly into the light. Eschewing her darkroom experiments, the artist is now exploring the fundamental appointed meaning of photography—documentation, as in picture-taking rather than picture-making.

Coming from a recent four-month creative sojourn (a fellowship grant awarded to her by the Asian Cultural Council and Silverlens Foundation) in the art and cultural nucleus of the world, New York, Navarroza has realized that her beloved medium exists not just for taking ‘pretty pictures’ and capturing mise-en-scènes with otherworldly characters and equally eerie elements—all wrapped around in strings and deliberately orchestrated by the shutterbug who acts as master puppeteer in a pompous show.

“My photography now is not for expressionistic means. I don’t use the medium as a way of wearing my heart on a sleeve. I don’t like it anymore; it’s too easy,” Navarroza confesses. “It doesn’t fit me now but it did for a while because I was also living that mindset for a time. I was more isolated, and I lived by the lake. I spent a lot of time thinking and philosophizing about life. I was an existentialist to the bone.”

Before, Navarroza’s imagery comes forth from poetry and music, making them narratives and tableaus reflecting the mapping out of the ‘self.’ Now, Navarroza explains that she doesn’t “feel obliged with the weight of photography to tell a story, a report, and an expression. I’m more prone to deny the camera now. I’ve worked with the medium for many years and I’ve developed a relationship with it that I started to question what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been perpetuating with my works.”

Navarroza further says that she’s now avoiding ‘spectacularizing’ her works and is more interested in seeing her pictures as little windows or frames that can people can engage their mind and thought processes into.
Aesthetically speaking, her latest pieces are leaning towards the minimal and bare—qualities that people probably would have never thought possible to manifest in Navarroza’s opuses. Some, especially those who are so fond of the artist’s photographic metaphors, may altogether snub or reject this change but to Navarroza’s credit, the 180-degree turn just proved how she continuously defy notions, how she is still able to shock us and make us think—this time—with her colored pictures.

According to the artist, her installation of her digital photographs is dominated by strips, stacks, grids, and lines. “This is directly informed by the things I saw when looking out of airplanes, or zipping through underground lines of the subway, or walking alongside buildings that looked like mighty sentinels standing shoulder to shoulder. It happens when you visit a city with streets that are designed to form a grid,” she stresses.

“The new works present how I relate to photography as a lived experience, free from visual trickeries, and the cargo of the history of photography. I find it pleasurable now to reduce things to their mere-ness,” Navarroza claims. “Isn’t this what photography is all about? Recording the emanation of physicalities, of light bounced back to the camera? It’s clinical to a certain point.”

The artist’s creative process these days involve just living the continuum of daily life and just being more conscious of the familiar things around her, in the hopes that they, the trivial and the ‘achingly banal,’ may reveal their true selves to the photographer. And upon this act of stripping down, of exposure, will Navarroza pick up her camera and get trigger-happy. Now, the artist need not feel burdened to assign meaning and weight to her subjects because it seems that her subjects unveil their worth to the artist that easily, as if the most boring thing “becomes a haiku.” If only we could see things the way Navarroza sees them. If only we could pursue to dissect the profundity of the trite. How delightful it must be to look at things in a ‘less literal sense.’

Navarroza’s artistic sensibilities and representations may have drastically changed but her fiery passion to see the world through a camera’s lens has remained. “But [as] always, there’s love,” Navarroza concludes. “How can it be possible for me to photograph something that I have not loved even at least for a fraction of a second? I thought of it, it must be love.”

The artist’s new works will be on view from October 7 to November 7 at the Silverlens Gallery located at 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Yupangco Building 2, Makati City. For more details, call 816-0044 or visit www.silverlensphoto.com.