Hoping that CECAP keeps its film archives safe

y political definition, I am a Cordilleran having spent 55 of my 58 years in Baguio City. But I’m still a city mouse.

I’ve made it a point to see as much of “my Cordilleran homeland” as possible, vainly hoping it would make me “more Cordilleran.” Being a journalist and photographer in a previous life (before I became a lawyer) often gave me that opportunity.

For instance in 1988, I did some slide film photodocumentary work for the Central Cordillera Agricultural Project (CECAP) under Director Tom Gimenez. The job called for me to shoot about 100 rolls of Kodachrome, documenting traditional farming practices in Mountain Province and Ifugao.

That’s when I learned the painful lesson to never believe a true native Cordilleran who gives you a verbal descriptive estimate of DISTANCE.

“Bernie, adayo ba diay papanan tayo?” (is it far where we’re going) I asked my local guide Bernard Foryasen who was from Natonin, Mountain Province.

He said, “dita laeng asideg” (right around there not too far).

We hiked for five hours.

After five days, I was able to put together a rough “description-to-travel-time” conversion table, based on Bernard’s descriptions to me. Something like “dita laeng”- 5 hours hiking time; “idta bangir” – 8 hours; “idiay” – 1 full day; “idiaaaaaaaayyy!”- bring food and drinks for 1 week.

I was lugging a big camera bag that held 3 Nikon bodies (back then SLR’s were all-metal, no plastic) and 6 lenses, including a heavy 500mm “catadioptric” or mirror reflex lens. Whenever we settled down for the night, I was aching in parts of my body I never knew I had.

I looked at our itinerary and guide map for the next day’s shoot. The names of the places were Sagada, Barlig, Paracelis, Natonin, Banawe, Hapaw, Hungduan, Guinihon, Batad….

I called Tom Gimenez. He called the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) who operated off Bagabag Airport in Nueva Vizcaya. They sent over a helicopter to pick us up and I completed the rest of the job photo-mapping all these farming communities from the air.

If you haven’t flown over the Cordilleras yet in a helicopter, one that can cruise slow enough and just high enough, and even hover over one spot, you have not seen the place from a critical perspective.

Up in the air, the Cordilleras look so awesomely picturesque, unbelievably beautiful, virginally pristine and—the best word I could think of—so FRAGILE.

I felt the same way Meryl Streep felt flying over the savanna in “Out of Africa” that as soon as we landed all I wanted to do was grab the first native Cordilleran I could find by the scruff of the neck, shake him up and say, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever, EVER give this land away to anybody, you hear me??!”

All the slides I took are still with CECAP today (I hope).

The thing about slides—especially Kodachromes—is you only ever get ONE COPY of it. It cannot be faithfully reproduced. Unlike color negatives that allow you to produce as many positive prints as you want. When you shoot slides, the roll of film that you loaded into the camera, after it is processed, IS the final product itself. The processed roll is just chopped up into individual frames and mounted onto these little square plastic frames that you load into a carousel tray. Each frame is a color POSITIVE, so you can project it to a screen and watch the whole slide show like a movie.

I did the photoshoot totally from a "National Geographic" approach. I photographed Ifugao farmers repairing rice terrace walls, women whipping rice pannicles to separate the chaff before pounding, men hoisting a carabao up the next level of a rice terrace, glorious sunsets framing silhouettes of thatched roofed huts, and many more. I count it as one of my best works--that I never got to keep.

That was 33 years ago. So much may have changed since 1988. Even I am curious to know—what did I capture on film 33 years ago that are no longer there now? I don’t know anybody in CECAP now, I don’t even know if that World Bank-funded project still exists and how well they take care of their film archives.

I may be subjective, even biased. But if I were to rank the six Cordillera provinces, I think Mountain Province has done the best job of protecting and preserving the land. And I don’t mean this just in the narrow sense that they have kept out the “outsider” better. They have shown to me a deeper affectation for their place and culture in a manner I haven’t witnessed in Benguet, for example. When I was doing the shooting from the ground in Natonin, Bernard spent most of his time explaining to village folk and fending off some people who wanted to interfere with my work.

They said something to me I will never forget. When I told them I was doing no harm and was just capturing images in this little black box called a “camera” they said, no, I was capturing the soul of the place. Don’t be ridiculous, I said. That is just superstition.

Looking back now 33 years later, I take it back. They were right and I was wrong. I DID capture the soul of the place, I did capture the spirit of the land. They are locked up in those slides. And the only good news is, those slides never left the Cordilleras.

I just don’t know where they are.