Flesh & Faith

Flesh and Faith: The People Who Make Manila

Manila’s tourist trail runs nowhere near Tondo. That was the reason for going.

I arrived with only a handful of pins on a map and no fixed itinerary, pulled toward the parts of the city the guidebooks leave blank. Tondo, one of Manila’s most densely populated districts, carries a reputation as a slum. What I found there, in its people, in their resilience, in their hospitality, was nothing that word could account for.

The district unfolds like a labyrinth built without end, a tangle of houses and food stalls folding into workspaces, workspaces folding back into homes. It is a place people warn you about, where survival can mean theft, or worse. I understood the risk before I set foot inside it, and for the first hours my photographs showed it. They were cautious, distant, empty of anything but the space I kept between myself and the street.

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Robert Capa

I had known the line for years. It took Tondo to make me feel the weight of it. The story I was chasing had not yet revealed itself, and it was never going to from across the road. So, I went back out, closer this time, and let the district work on me: the colour, the smell, the noise, all of it raw and impossible to look away from.

Down a crowded alleyway, a group of men played a hybrid of pool and air hockey, cigarettes hanging from their lips, ash curling like tired fingers over the table. Further along, laughter and the bounce of a basketball drew me around a corner into a hundred curious eyes, a game already in full swing. The children wanted to know who I was, and then they wanted me to play. I gave up a few minutes on a sore shoulder for the chance to sit and shoot as the match folded back around me, right up until a tricycle came barrelling across the court to a chorus of horns and shouting. It was bedlam, and it was joy, and it carried the knowledge that it would not last long. Word was already spreading that a foreigner had wandered in.

Saint Niño de Pajotan Festival

The rumbling began before sunrise, before the smog had lifted and the roosters had properly woken. Electricity moved through the streets and pulled me out the door before I had registered it, camera already in hand, sleep still in my eyes.

Crowds flocked toward the church, packing themselves inside as though air itself were in short supply. I hold no particular faith of my own, but the devotion on display was impossible not to respect. The Pajotan Festival, held each year on the third Sunday of January, centres on Santo Niño, the child Jesus, in a celebration woven through generations of the community’s history. Its name traces back further still, to pajo, a variety of mango once grown in abundance in the district of Mayapajo, meaning ‘there is pajo’. How a mango and a saint’s day came to share a festival is a thread I never managed to pull straight, and perhaps that is as it should be. Some things a traveller simply has to let stand as they are.

What was undeniable was the scale of it. Floats, marching bands, flag bearers, and towering costumes moved through the streets in a procession too large and too loud to photograph from any distance. Standing a head above most of the crowd, I abandoned any hope of staying unseen. Strangers wanted photographs. Grandmothers wanted to flirt. For a while I was as much a spectacle as the parade itself. But once the floats began to roll and the bands found their rhythm, the crowd’s attention moved elsewhere, and I was left again with only the work in front of me.

The sun climbed over tin and brick houses stacked precariously atop one another, its light falling into alleyways thick with the smoke of open-flame cooking: pork, chicken, steamed corn, and a vendor waving down customers over a battered container of iced tea. Away from the festival’s centre, children rushed up with peace signs raised and tongues out, poses that rarely make a photograph worth keeping. I let most of them pass by.

Bells rang out, tangled with chanting and the pound of drums, and then the priest appeared, moving through the crowd with a quiet authority that cut straight through my own brief novelty. Worshippers flung water toward him from small plastic bottles. He reached out to touch faces as he passed, and each touch seemed to light something behind their eyes.

By the time the procession wound down, I was spent, my shutter finger sore from hours of use. I have not yet gone through the full set of images. Some of what Tondo gave me, I suspect, is still waiting to be found.