Homestyle Magazine, Jan 2008
“A story well told,” Robert McKee famously wrote, “gives you the very thing you cannot get from life: meaningful emotional experience. In life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time. In art, they are meaningful now, at the instant they happen.”The implications of this is what drives most artists and cultural workers into self-sacrifice: that others may find meaning enough in their own lives to change their worlds (hopefully for the better), even if only for a little while, if only for a little bit.
It is also part of what drives the global discourse today on how best to legitimize digital photography as fine art in developing nations like ours, where people still mistakenly believe that art is irrelevant to economic survival, and whose idea of fine art is still largely defined by painting.
Into these heated debates about art, technology and emancipation innocently crashlands Blowup Babies, a full-production photography house run by six friends with a shared passion for movies: JA Tadena, a cinematographer; his wife Ning, a professional make-up artist and former pre-school teacher; Jessie Pastor, a cinematographer/ director; his wife Pam, a production designer; Quark Henares, a movie director; and Lia Martinez, a color-grader.
By simply attempting to raise the technical standards in commercial portraiture; by training their photographers the traditional way (Zone System metering, depth-of-field scales); by aggressively delivering value-for-money; and by generally educating the mass market about the importance of proper lighting and the judicious use of Photoshop; Blowup Babies might just inadvertently succeed where museums and art galleries are failing.
Jessie points out -–and rightly so– that Filipinos don’t have a culture of museum-hopping to begin with, so the attempt to legitimize digital photography “from the top, down” may be ineffective here. Better to do as they do: create your own market, and soak it enough in excellence so that it eventually demands excellence on its own.
Amusingly enough, Blowup Babies’ beginnings are intellectually humble: The Tadenas merely wanted to open a restaurant, but JA couldn’t cook, so they opted for a photo/portrait studio instead, because, at the very least, JA would “instinctively know what a good photograph was.” They enlisted the help of the Pastors, and the others who all further raised standards. And the house was born.
Come to think of it, intellectual humility might be JA’s trademark by now: as a wayward student, he got rejected by DLSU’s Comm Arts program TWICE, which led him to take special classes at UP Film Institute, where he met his wife. He then got rejected by Mowelfund’s Directing program as well, which led him to realize that what he loved about filmmaking was really cinematography, anyway.
Bullseye! He ran with the epiphany, and quickly became the youngest award-winning cinematographer in the country. And there was no turning back.
Painful discernment has marked Jessie as well. A pioneer survivor of art incubator Makiling/PHSA, he graduated from UP Fine Arts with a degree in Painting in the mid 80’s, when anti-commercialist sentiments were at a boiling point. When he entered advertising, he was branded a sellout, an artistic prostitute.
Decades later, Homestyle throws him back into the center of the fray, full circle, with JA in tow.
In art, Blowup Babies is meaningful now.
