Fotomoto exhibit opens at BenCab

As BenCab Museum celebrates its 14th year, it will be celebrating with the opening of FotomotoPH – photography collective that organizes the largest festival of Philippine photography to date.
The group’s objective is to promote Philippine photography as a manifestation of shared experience as a nation, including diversity in perspectives from different geographies, socio-economic status, genders and ages.
Through exhibitions and a programming of educational activities, FotomotoPH aims to foster conversations about photography’s role in Filipinos’ culture and demonstrate ways in which the photographic medium as an art form can express their complex identities.
The collectives’ founding members are Raena Abella, Jes Aznar, E.S.L. Chen, Tom Epperson, Stephanie Frondoso, Francisco Guerrero, Wawi Navarroza, Apa Ongpin, Neal Oshima, Gio Panlilio, Sandra Palomar, Jason Quibilan, and Veejay Villafranca.
The festival originates in Metro Manila but aims to travel to different regions during its annual cycle. Now on its second year, FotomotoPH launched Fotomoto22: Home with an open call throughout the Philippines and the diaspora.
The exhibition at BenCab Museum is the festival’s first time to travel to the northern region, in solidarity with National Artist Benedicto Cabrera’s participation in the first Fotomoto festival and also as a way to connect with photographers in the region, some of whom are nationally well-respected.
Participants approached the theme of “home” in response to the collective experience of having emerged from the past two years with new perspectives on our homes due to prolonged isolation, working and studying from home, migration, displacement, the loss of one’s home or finding a new one. The sense of home, while tied to places, may also be as abstract as a feeling, relationship, or ritual.
The FotomotoPH jury welcomed all cultural, historical, socio-political, and personal narratives captured through the various genres of photo-based works. From the festival’s main body of work, 100 images were selected to be presented at the BenCab Museum. – Press release