the further i go, the more that i know

It dawned on me the other day that since I started carrying my Aqua Pix around with me all the time, I've been unwittingly uncovering a love for this city I grew up in.

This rediscovered hobby has documented the recurring themes in my life (loneliness included) and, in my effort to look for subjects worth keeping in picture form, has led me to really stop and look at Metro Manila from a new perspective. And for every exposure, I keep finding new favorite things about it.

It's taught me to say, "Fuck it," and bring my camera out at a busy intersection to capture a moment, a person, an object I find too interesting for words. It's taught me to stay alert and to get off my phone and to remember why I love long bus rides and window seats. Sometimes, when I'm trying to finish a roll of film, I would take a detour on my way home and walk around somewhere in search of anything that sticks out—like this game I would play with myself on car rides, where I try to look for something I think is beautiful every ten seconds. Turns out it's not hard at all, and I'm never disappointed.

I feel like I've known how to define something—being a part of Manila—for years, but it's only now that I'm understanding it.

So, here, again, is a glimpse into my own personal Metro Manila.

I don't know if you can tell, but that's a cat.

She said, “Let it slide.”

A bit back I got this sudden urge to try out black and white film, just because I never had before, so I found myself splurging on a Kodak Tri-X 400 at Satchmi and loading it into my Aqua Pix. I finished it off relatively quickly, but when I went to drop it off for processing, the shop said I'd have to wait a whole month to get it back and see my photos. Luckily, I called after two weeks and was super excited to find that they were ready.

When I was using the roll, I didn't read up beforehand on how to properly shoot black and white. I had to learn to rely more on the textures and the moment to take effective and interesting images, because with color, it's so easy to hide behind vivid, bright subjects in all kinds of hues. So I would sometimes come across a really colorful object and couldn't do anything about it, because it wouldn't translate well in grayscale. And when I finally saw the pictures, I was so happy with how they turned out—especially considering they came from a toy camera!

These photos were taken all over Metro Manila (and all over my life, for that matter): UP, Vargas Museum, SM North and TriNoma, the MRT, Ortigas and Shaw, Cubao X. The final half were from the day I decided to walk around Avenida and Escolta by myself on Independence Day, in search of zines and a national identity. (Okay, not really the latter, but I'd never felt more like a citizen of Manila than I did exploring those streets and experiencing the slice-of-life culture fully on my own.) 

Fun, only sort-of related tidbit: I got lost on my way to Escolta, and just as I was inwardly slapping my forehead and telling myself Gob Bluth's catchphrase, "I've made a huge mistake," the bootleg music stand I was walking by started playing Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence." As in, "Hello, darkness, my old friend." One of my favorite moments ever in all my twenty-one years for sure.