Filipino photographer draws from 'Ondoy,' 'Odette' experiences in Bali photo festival

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BALI, Indonesia — After Typhoon Odette dissipated on December 21, 2021, it entered the Philippine history books as the second costliest tropical cyclone in the country’s history, just before 2013’s Yolanda.

In the aftermath of the typhoon, conservation photographer Gab Mejia documented how Odette severely affected coastal communities in Siargao and the Dinagat Islands — how they adapted and became forcibly resilient.

These harrowing photos led him to recall his own experience with the effects of storms as his family house was flooded in waist-deep water in 2009 due to Typhoon Ondoy when he was just a teenager.

All of the family’s furniture were gone and archival pictures captured by his father and grandfather, who were also photographers, were damaged. They had no access yet to digital archiving; even Mejia’s baby photos were gone.

The incident set Mejia on his path to do documentary work related to climate change, particularly around water, and upon browsing his family’s photos again he realized the images now appear as if they have been chemically altered or bleached, with ink smudged across them.

That inspired the photographer to start “White Water,” a series of pictures that explores the intersection of memory, colonial history, and rising sea levels across the Philippine archipelago.

Mejia entered his “White Water” series in the second-ever FOTO Bali Festival in Indonesia, where he is deemed the first and only Filipino to exhibit from nearly 700 global submissions.

For this year’s edition, the festival’s theme is "Afterimage," examining how selections explore memory, continuity, and the ways images persist beyond the moment they capture.

Moving between personal narratives and broader reflections on history, identity, and collective experience, the selected projects consider how photographs continue to shape meaning over time.

“How do these images speak to you  after they've been taken 16 years later?” Mejia told Philstar.com after the festival’s opening last June 3. “It’s a way for me to create new meaning with what we're experiencing collectively in the Philippines, [where for] coastal communities — after a super typhoon — the impacts aren't just at that moment.”

The photographer listed more threats like sea level rise and issues in the West Philippine Sea, the impacts of which take years and decades. Such threats, Mejia feels, are so entangled with how Filipinos view water amid the persistence of climate change.

Beyond the sea

Thirty-six (36) photographers and artists were selected for this year’s FOTO Bali Festival, each of them having a different way of interpreting the open call for “Afterimage.” 

Philstar.com asked Mejia how contemporary photography is a form of storytelling for history, identity, and memories — in his case memories lost due to flood waters or a reminder about coastal communities — beyond the still image.

Mejia admitted that the consensus for photography in the Philippines is “really puritan or a lot of purist works and social realism being the truth teller.” This view is something that he wants to challenge as a documentary and conservation photographer working on journalistic stories about preserving the environment.

There is something lacking in being able to express, see, and humanize images, Mejia said, noting that in capturing photos related to climate change, what you see is not what you get.

“How can you be able to express the emotional, compounding trauma of what coastal communities experience, what I experienced in 2009, and how that lands or paints a picture of how I see our country in a contemporary society's lens?” the photographer posited.

Another example he pointed out was his experiences documenting sea level rise, asking how one can depict something temporal that spans years. He reiterated experimenting in order to challenge the idea of “truth making” or how photographs are seen as “fragments of truth.”

Mejia's questions and concerns led him to pursue new media like collages and illustrations. His photographs selected for the festival made him return to coastal communities, dipping them in sand, which gave the pictures a whole new meaning.

Even the title “White Water” offered multiple meanings for Mejia. It is the systems of whiteness affecting the Philippines at large and the geopolitical tensions from the United States and China trying to claim sovereignty over our waters.

"It is also the literal foam that forms whenever waves crash on the beach. It's this transitional phase like something rapid, vapid, and settles,” he added. “That's where I really sort of drew the concept of really challenging these ideas of solidification, memory, and truth through images.”

Of narratives and communities

Philstar.com also spoke with festival director Kelsang Dolma about how the event wants contemporary photography to be viewed.

Dolma said that FOTO Bali is generally trying to aim at contemporary photography and photography as a medium at large to bridge a disconnection, explaining that everyone has access to the medium in the age of smartphones.

“I think that knowledge of even visual storytelling, from a photographer's point of view, lens-based artist's point of view, and someone with a handheld camera's point of view, differs,” she continued. “What we are trying to achieve is how we can bring all of them together to have a dialogue. Because no one is better than the other; it's a different perspective.”

The festival also wants to bring in people who are curious about the process of image-making, which as Mejia explained is not limited to when a photograph is taken. “A photographic print is not just about a memory or a captured moment. It's also about what is before and after of that image,” Dolma added.

She credited festival curators Kurniadi Widodo and Putu Sridiniari for a brilliant job in tying together the different narratives that came through the submission — narratives of before and after captured moments done through memory, identity, archival, or experimental means.

“I think photography is such a powerful medium. It's a timestamp, basically a proof that something happened. I think that is something that we are trying to stitch together through different personal and abstract narratives,” Dolma said, as artists collaborate in a way that is relevant to the Balinese community hosting them.

Another aspect she found fascinating about the festival was how entrants were not changing their ideas or bodies of work to be selected, rather they used existing material to see how it supports the overarching narrative. This way the artist selection becomes a secondary act to support the theme, one of mainly communication and narrative building.

Dolma praised Mejia, calling him an "emerging artist getting a lot of visibility." She highlighted his work on coastal communities, which resonates deeply from a Balinese context being an island too famed for its beaches but faces issues familiar to coastal regions, such as waste management and plastic pollution.

Familiarity, therefore, is a key factor as it becomes easier for locals to understand an artist’s point of view, Dolma said. She is glad that there is a Filipino telling the Philippines' own story and struggles, even for a brief time. 

While FOTO Bali brands itself as an international photography festival, it is still being held in a community that affects Balinese as much as it does the abundance of international tourists visiting Nuanu Creative City, which is hosting the event in its Labyrinth Art Gallery.

Dolma moved to Bali from her native India four years ago, and as someone with an arts background, immediately searched for opportunities to work in the creative sector, as well as look for artists, galleries, and studios.

She found a huge gap between the demand from the local and international communities in Bali, the supply, and the interconnectedness. Dolma pointed out that not many people know that Bali has the second-largest artist community in Indonesia behind Yogyakarta.

“But the way the Balinese artist community has been growing is from a lens of craftsmanship, artisanship,” Dolma continued. “We wanted to make sure that there is also dialogue where that could also get positioned and juxtaposed with contemporary dialogue too.”

It was important then that the festival does not use Bali as a backdrop like a form of cultural appropriation, but instead view it as a platform to bring international dialogue done with the local community — not just through panel discussions but as well as an exchange of work.

“This is where it becomes real, where the Balinese artist community is not just coming as an audience. It's coming as a collaborator on a level where they are a part of the festival to show what Bali, Indonesia has to offer and what they can exchange with the international community,” Dolma ended.

Let creativity thrive

Night had fallen fast when Philstar.com asked Mejia his own thoughts on FOTO Bali being an international festival where global artists come together to give definitions for photography in a place like Nuanu Creative City and Bali, giving the latter a new image beyond a tourist trap.

The photographer pointed to the Philippines and Indonesia as archipelagos, as well as their resonance and similarities with threats like mass tourism, where Western tourists sort of assimilate into their cultures.

In his view, the Philippines does not have renowned festivals like FOTO Bali, which challenges or resists the influx of tourism by being proud of one’s culture. Mejia is still holding out hope for a similar festival in the Philippines. 

He also noted the country’s cultural institutions operating in the provinces like satellite branches of the National Museum that still feel "very colonial" with their design infrastructures. He conceded that recent ones, like the newly opened satellite museum in Baler, is already in line with his hope for the Philippines.

“It's showing sort of a future of the possibilities, what can be done in the Philippines which resonates with the same ecology and landscape, being diverse, even with the languages, and having international artists,” the photographer added.

While he again acknowledged the presence of popular art programs in the Philippines, there is still a gap in bringing dissenting voices to the art and cultural scene, especially in photography.

“Sobrang may limitations, sobrang surface level ng pag-question of even concepts,” Mejia ended. “I guess it's already starting out, we're learning so much. It's also a privilege to be here to experience this, maybe it's something that I can take away back in the Philippines.”

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