Not the heads of two strangers whose tops touch each other at a diner, but the neck of a bottle of ketchup jutting out of the counter. Not the spectacle of specks from fireworks in the dark, but the specter of a window that seems not so much an opening into the structure of a building but into the structure of night. Not the thicket thickening the photographic field, but the image of a bicycle wheel cropped not only by the dominating foliage and its upper border of people but by the edge of the photograph itself.

Such details punctuate – are the punctum, as Barthes would put it – of Wawi Navarroza’s new exhibition dubbed as “Perhaps It Was Possibly Because.” Opens today and will run until November 7, the exhibit is a spectrum of objects wrenched from the daily contexts of their accidental environments, every picture a departure from the mise-en-scene of chance.

Unstaged, each scene appears pure, true. As if the photographer has chosen to partake of no arrangement, no intervention; and yet having taken the photographs, she has already intervened.
For the camera is a disturbance, a recorder that fails to record its own process of recording: How does one document a moment without the documentation altering the moment? How does one document the alteration documentation itself entails?

Isn’t a moment defined precisely by the violence, with which it is displaced from its studium – by the violence with which a moment is not a moment?

Between documentary and fiction, there lies the abyss of photography – into which Navarroza consistently falls, with which Navarroza continues to fall in love. (Angelo V. Suarez)

(Wawi Navarroza is recipient of the first Asian Cultural Council-Silverlens Foundation Fellowship Grant which sent her to New York City’s International Center of Photography. She returns to a solo show at Silverlens Gallery a year and a half after her first solo show in the photography gallery. Since Saturnine at Silverlens, she has won the Ateneo Art Awards, exhibited in the Netherlands, France, Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and soon, Italy.

For inquiries, contact Silverlens Gallery at tel. nos.: 816-0044, 0917-5874011, e-mail at manage@silverlensphoto.com, or visit www.silverlensphoto.com, slab.silverlensphoto.com.