JOSE Cecilio Magsaysay began taking photographs with an old film Nikon when he was in high school, but he traces his origins back even further. “Growing up as a boy in what was Mandaluyong then,” he relates wistfully, “I spent a lot of time playing in the fields in front of the house. There I discovered tadpoles, dragonflies, butterflies, grasshoppers, and fish.”
His childhood, largely spent outdoors, is filled with memories of making mud dams in the rainy season, burning dry grass in the summer, building secret forts, flying kites in the amihan, having kite dogfights, and playing baseball. “I can still smell the grass after it rains. I can still see small spider webs glistening with the overnight dewdrops. I can still smell suagkabayo, a plant that smells like coriander.” The beauty of life and nature, visible from the all-encompassing spectacle of the Milky Way galaxy at night down to the intricate patterns in the smallest leaf, fueled Jing’s curiosity and drive to discover novelty in the every day. It taught him to see the overlooked details obscured by the grind of routine. In seeking to record and share his visceral experiences of the world around him, Jing began what was to be a very long love affair with photography.
In crafting his particular style of landscape photography, Jing looks for powerful contrasts in light, preferring strong light and dark values that produce bold colors and textures.
Each photograph contains physical and emotional worlds in themselves, regardless of whether it took a split-second or a lifetime to capture. Ironically, photographs arrest visual evidence of life’s constant changes; exposing transience by capturing a moment that can never again be perfectly replicated. In landscape photography, the poetry of water, land, clouds, and wind is inscribed into history through the help of human intervention.
Several of Jing’s works in this exhibition are combinations of two or more photographs – “Inspiration” features a singular bright firework against the last vestiges of a shining sunset, a field of wheat in “The Sun and the Grass” is lit from the east while a desert-gold sun sets in the west – injecting subtle touches of surreal that spark the mind’s exploration into an “alternate photographic reality.”
Stories of Light, an exhibition of 21 photographs by Jing Magsaysay
will be held on the 23rd of September at 4:00 in the afternoon, at Galerie Stephanie’s pop-up gallery at the Lobby of 8 Rockwell, Plaza corner Hidalgo Drive, Rockwell Center, Makati. It will be on view from the 18th to the 28th of September, 2017.
