In 2015, I set up a large format camera, with two bellows extensions, & powerful flash units to create macro photographs of Filipino anting-antings, or talismans. I encountered technical challenges that the digital camera, terms such as reciprocity failure and bellows extension compensation, has long disregarded— technicalities of shooting macro on large format.
I wanted to photograph the anting-antings in a way that would better recognise the images they once sought to represent. Most of these agitates were created through the process of lost wax casting, that over the years of use, have lost their sharpness, leaving us with traces of the original images— Filipino interpretations of Catholic imagery brought by the colonisers.
On the anting-antings, the late Filipino polymath Floy Quintos has said “Time and colonisation forces us to hide sacred things in our culture, and secrecy itself becomes something sacred.”
Anting-anting, or agimat, as they are locally known, are medallions made of brass, worn or kept close the body. They are meant to provide the bearer protection, luck, and mystical powers. They represent a system of Filipino beliefs that combine pre-colonial animism, Catholic doctrines, as well as cabalistic and masonic traditions. During the colonial period, many peasants carried them in fervent belief that their mystical properties would give them power. Today, it is still carried or worn by the military, the police and members of secret cults.
The amulets incorporates images of Catholic iconographies, and a combination of Tagalog and pig Latin inscriptions. Recognising the iconographies, I attempted to find their source by visiting (and talking my way into) the Warburg Institute and their library of iconographic images. Here I found Madonna Lactans, or Mary breastfeeding Jesus, an iconographic image dating back to (at least) the 12th century.
Agimat is a small part of a larger project, an examination of Filipino culture that investigates aspects of mysticism, country western music, folk Catholicism & ethnographies through a community of people who share a creative energy that is ritual as well as spiritual
More scans to come…
