A landscape sheds its own truth. In matters that are visual, artists can provide a piece of it. MM Yu, a Filipino artist who has used photography as a tool for discovery, plays the role of this truth-seeker—surveying, scouring, and detecting the land for some of the truths that have been fortuitously shaped by two principles: beauty and irony. The city, for instance, can be avast source of inadvertent compositions—of unpremeditated schemes of color, forms, shapes and balance. A city like Manila particularly, which is caught between the limbo of progress and obsolescence, of gentrification and decay, of urbanization and entropy, can also bear several layers of visual cacophony that, if arranged carefully, can produce thought-provoking statements or witty asides.

MM Yu is a deft arranger of these layers and demonstrates an intuitive point-of-view in order to shift our attention to corresponding angles that re-animate her subjects into something else—like how a mound of gravel on the street can be portrayed as a dismal, uninhabited mountain range or how a sea of garbage can turn into found, anonymous collages. A pile of flattened, galvanized rooftops amass together as a kind of elegiac monument from a city ravaged by a deadly typhoon; while construction sites, abandoned dwellings, as well as stacks of concrete blocks—raw materials for building a new edifice—are framed by MM Yu to present the different passages of structures that make up the city. It is the city’s portrait, so to speak, that she is after. Or more accurately, the city’s more idiosyncratic and ironic personas. It is the portrait of the city as a cunning survivor.

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In Transit

The existence of vagabonds’ homes within the city marks a break from the landscape. The sidewalk achieves renovation: a mattress, a pile of hollow blocks, a hammock, or the subtle layering of cardboard on an elevated walkway invade the streets not as vandalisms but as methods of home improvement.

Whether functional or aesthetic, the spontaneous conglomeration of these colorful and diverse components becomes a phenomenon of design with corresponding pictorial qualities worthy to demand artistic evaluations. But it can also be argued that our encounters with these images—as a social phenomenon more rooted in the unique, economic, and political landscape, where the arbitrariness of ‘territory’ have led informal settlers to evolve as ‘mobile’ units—would fit more into the classifications of reportage, of the journalistic, or as documented case studies.

In photographing the makeshift homes that hound the streets of Manila, MM Yu employs the idea of the tableau. She picks out the opposite part of the sidewalk as her vantage point, assuming the role of an observer who has completely surrendered her attention against the diorama in front of her. The image becomes part documentation and part carefully sought compositions, whose gap MM Yu tries to bridge through her photographs. The different components of these makeshift homes appear inside the frame as cohesive parts, eliminating any eroding effect that their sudden intervention might cause; wooden carts are parked motionless as if they were permanent fixtures along the street, while the peculiarities found in the picture are evened out by the somberness of the situation as it touches briefly on the outcome of deprivation from one of human’s basic needs.

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Untitled Landscape

Photographs of places, structures, and objects become more telling than any portrait of human emotion. The series of pictures becomes a glimpse to a life, to a society, to human nature and how it adapts to the complexities of its own culture. The many faces of a city are revealed before us—those that are obscured from our normal view of a once-familiar landscape. And this view coincides with our view of the artist as she takes on different roles to reveal a hidden world and an obscured truth as she becomes anthropologist, ethnographer, cartographer, chronicler, archivist, sociologist, humanist, and most importantly—photographer.

We see urinals transformed into pots for growing plants, statues used as hooks for hanging plastic bags, and oil leaks left on the asphalt as they generate colorful prisms. For MM Yu, the nuanced vista, creeping within congruent elements, are recipes to a latent picture. The condition inside the frame typifies the improvisational approach needed to survive life in this kind of city— the resourcefulness of the city dweller and the unexpected entanglements and combinations of structures.

The photographer takes on the role as the seeker of these truths. The grittiness of the cityscape, the idiosyncrasy of a given situation, or the eccentricity of a personality are ‘truths’ that are out there. They are conditions that make up the whole being of a landscape. As one theorist has pointed out, photography has the capacity to amplify human abilities, notably, the ability of depiction and detection. If what we are seeking is a special quality that separates these photographers from the rest of the field, then it is in their manner of detecting new visual schemes in order to create an effect. In MM Yu’s brand of images, we can sense a triumvirate of urgency, misery, and absurdity, all working together to define the state of a certain locality.

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