Fotomoto's Big Photography Show of 2025 is Tribute to our Islands
This year's theme explores our connection to our islands, our homes, and roots.
(SPOT.ph) Arts month has officially began and kickstarting it is the photography event of the season: Fotomoto’s third edition called i/Land, which explores people’s connections with our archipelago. More than a thousand photographs from all over the country were submitted after the open call last year, and 74 photographers’ works will be shown during the exhibition that begins February 1 at the 2nd Floor Gallery of Ayala Museum in Makati.
Since its inaugural open call in 2022, the Fotomoto shows have been a significant event in the photography scene and among local photography fans. Fotomoto is “an organization of visionary photographers, artists, curators, and writers dedicated to promoting Philippine photography through a regular cycle of exhibitions, public programs, and special projects.” It’s first chosen theme was Portraits, a response to our isolated existences during the pandemic, when we longed to see the faces of friends, loved ones, colleagues IRL; this was followed by the theme, Home, which we all started seeing in a different light following the Covid lockdowns.
This year, for edition 3, the harvest of photographs captures the Philippines in glimpses and snippets, showcasing our islands in the big and small moments when we experience them: the innocence of children amid a flooded area in Ilocos; an OFW drag queen’s pride in herself and her home country captured in her glamour portrait by the beach; a Mount Kanlaon embraced by clouds—a scene that might have inspired our ancestors to weave tales that may or may not have influenced who we are as a people.
This year’s selection and curation committee is composed of renowned photographers Neal Oshima, Wawi Navarroza and Tom Epperson, together with noted collector Loubella Samson, and reps from the influential Angkor Photo Festival, and the Jakarta International Photo Festival or JIPFEST. “For the first time, there’s an international/outsider’s gaze on the works, which made the selection more interesting,” says Jason Quibilan one of the founders of Fotomoto.
To go with the patikim of photos in this spread (some of which are part of a series), SPOT.ph is publishing the show's accompanying essay commissioned by the Fotomoto team, where husband and wife Gian Lao and Nicole Soriano reflect on this year's theme and selection of images:
Island—land because it is earth, but isle because surrounded by water.
On land we plant roots, build homes, pave roads that take us from one land to another. But it is water that nourishes, refreshes, sits in the horizon and promises freedom. On the other hand, water is our source of life—sustenance, navigation, and imagination. But it is land that holds us steady, embraces us, keeps us together when we become almost untethered by possibility.
In other words, land is important because it is not water. And water is important because it is not land.
In many ways, this Yin/Yang relationship fits the Filipino experience. Ours is a country, after all, of contradictions. We are at once united by colonial conquest and divided by remnants of pre-colonial tribalism. Overseas work makes families whole and splits them apart. Faith is both our anchor and, at times, the very thing that drowns us in guilt or despair. We thrive in hardship but are burdened by resilience. We celebrate freedom but remain bound by cycles of history that we cannot seem to break.
In this collection of photographs, we celebrate and mourn; we connect and dismantle; we aggregate and disaggregate these contradictions that constitute archipelagic life. We see children diving into bodies of water triumphantly, but also a bleak leg-and-slipper in black and white. Chiseled mountains with armors of cloud or backdrops of galaxy, but also ones excavated and quarried. The richly-colored flora and fauna of this country, but also its burning fields. The livelihood and ritual of water, but also the deluged city—the urban lake. There is a person alone on a mountain and there is a sea of hands in worship. Some contradictions exist in separate works, and some live in the same one.
The Physicist Niels Bohr once said that the opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. But the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. In this collection, we find proof of such a theorem: how it glorifies the many ways of being Filipino, while also questioning them. Every Filipino is tortured by water and nourished by it. Each one of us revels in our home soil, and is trapped in it. Every Filipino imagines life beyond the horizon, but everyone beyond our shores wishes only for return. No man is an island, but also: Everyone is.
Photographs and accompanying text courtesy of Fotomoto.