Mapping Invisible Cities featured in DPP
Page 50 of Digital Photographer Philippines showing one of my work (top image) when Mapping Invisible Cities was featured
Mapping Invisible Cities was featured by Digital Photographer Philippines in Issue 23 released December last year. It had the theme Urban. Below is the write up for my work.
The Other Manila
“Early in the workshop I was pouring over one of Peter’s (Bialobrzesky) books and I was struck by the phrase ‘Non-places,’” says Estan Cabigas.
“First coined by Marc Auge, they refer to spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance or history to be called ‘places.’ They can be malls, expressways, housing estates and the like where the sense of alienation, compartmentation and anonymity are common. So I thought of how that related to Manila, where the idea of space keeps shifting – open spaces are built over, old spaces are torn down so they can be converted into malls or other areas geared for commercialization and mass consumption.”
Cabigas decided to showcase the feeling of alienation by shooting the rows of of new buildings along Macapagal Avenue in Pasay. These structures were built on reclaimed land, thus having no history, yet their characterless prefab construction seems to speak of building with only haste and expediency in mind. To evoke the feeling of alienation, Cabigas found that it was more effective to shoot the structures with more sky in the frame, thus stressing emptiness and impermanence.
“The workshop really made me more attuned to the thinking process,” says Cabigas. “How do I put forward my vision? How can I do it with consistency? How can I make the images speak of what I want to express? But that’s only the first part. The second and more challenging part is how will I edit my work, how can I make the photos I present more cohesive and effectively tell my story. To do all that you really have to think.”
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