PARADOXICAL

Photo Contest Judge

I am glad I wasn't asked to talk about something I've never considered my forte, photography, at this event, the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Photo Contest.

That awful task fell on Ricky B.'s lap, who correctly reminded us that photography is a democratizing artform. Kahit di ka marunong magdibuho o magpinta, puwede ka nang maging visual artist.

Had I been asked, I wouldn't know what to say anything of value that would come across to the level of high schoolers, although I work with photographs every day. It's because I have a big problem with judging art itself: it is highly subjective, dependent on the set of judges at a given time.

Anyway, after the event, I imagined myself attempting to talk about it, but with a different audience, a more mature one.

I probably would have told them that a photo isn't just an image. It is a lot of other things. In my line of work, it is a means of documentation, a piece of hard evidence that an event really happened. To others, it could signify other things.

What I have observed personally about photography in our context is... two different photographers will have two different takes on the same subject. The type of camera and lens used matters a lot in terms of technicalities. But the choice of focus or subject, the framing, the cropping, the tint and lighting set, the angle and perspective, the overall style--all of these matter and have subtle effects on the viewer.

Then I would remind everyone about the philosophy behind photography by recalling my Humanities 101 prof Delfin Tolentino's explanation of Susan Sontag's take on the novel art form, i.e., that it is a form of rebellion, a rebellion from reality. To recall...

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When people say Susan Sontag believed photography is a rebellion, they are summarizing ideas from her book 'On Photography.' She didn't literally define photography as "rebellion," but many of her ideas point in that direction.

In simple words:

1. Taking a photograph is a way of resisting time. Everything changes, ages, and disappears. A photograph says, "Wait. This moment matters. I'm keeping it." In that sense, it rebels against forgetting.

2. Photography challenges ordinary ways of seeing. A photographer notices things that other people overlook—a shadow, a stranger's expression, a cracked wall. The camera encourages us to question what is worth paying attention to.

3. Photography can challenge power. Pictures of war, poverty, injustice, or protest can expose truths that governments or powerful people would rather hide. A single image can make people angry, compassionate, or motivated to act.

4. Photography also rebels against reality—but in a different way. Every photograph is a choice. The photographer decides what to include, what to leave out, and when to press the shutter. So a photograph is never the whole truth; it is one person's interpretation of reality.

5. At the same time, Sontag warned that photography has a downside. She argued that seeing endless photographs—especially of violence and suffering—can make people numb. Instead of feeling deeply, we may become mere spectators.

So, to sum up, for Susan Sontag, photography is a kind of rebellion because it preserves moments that would disappear, changes how we see the world, and can challenge accepted truths—but it also has the power to distance us from real experience.

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The above observations still strike me as so true after all these years. I wonder how other thinkers view photography, apart from the predictably left-leaning ones.

Also, I wonder how my fellow judges rated the various entries, since as it turned out, we were unanimous on just one of the entries, enough for it to land in the third place. As for the rest, we must have been in various degrees of disagreement.

And maybe that's why judging photographs is so difficult—but so worthwhile. You are not simply choosing the best image. You are choosing, however briefly, which way of seeing the world deserves to be seen by everyone else.

posted by Resty Odon  # 4:55 AM