Exposing EJKs and the State—A Collaborative Review of <em>Dark Lens/Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino Camera in Duterte's Republic</em>

Abstract

Convergence 2 Codex Nerissa S. Balce and Sarita Echavez See Exposing EJKs and the State— A Collaborative Review of Dark Lens/Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino Camera in Duterte’s Republic In May 2016, the Philippines began a new era of state-­sanctioned death documented by a new visual technology: the digital camera. Under the leadership of the nation’s sixteenth president, Rodrigo Roa Duterte, a drug war was launched as part of Duterte’s plan to end illegal drug use and drug trade. The new Philippine president believed that criminals , such as drug users and drug pushers, were “animals” who should be killed without due process (Berehaluk 2016; Goodman and Liwanag 2017). The elimination of criminal elements has been rationalized as a purging necessary for creating the new strongman’s version of the modern republic. Since its unleashing, Duterte’s drug war has claimed more than thirty thousand deaths, with more than 40 percent of the killings committed in Manila, the Philippine capital. Scholars have described this humanitarian crisis as a genocide of the poor (Coronel et al. 2018; Simangan 2018). Most of the dead are from the urban slums—­ men, women, teenagers, and children who were shot or killed in the cross fire, their bodies found in sewers; on dimly lit side streets; at busy intersections; by sari-­sari (corner) stores; and in jeepneys, on motorcycles, and in cars. Some corpses bear the marks of torture; some have their heads wrapped in duct tape so that identifying them has been impossible. Corpses have been found with handwritten signs in Filipino that say “I am a drug pusher.” Since the drug killings, a new generation of Filipino photographers, in the tradition of journalists during the Marcos dictatorship, have emerged Codex 3 to record the horror of the Philippine state. The essays for this Codex discuss the work Manila-­ based photographers Eloisa Lopez, Br. Ciriaco Santiago III, Ezra Acayan, and Raffy Lerma. The new photographs of the drug war return us to the camera’s old intimacies with death and state violence. The photographs of extrajudicial killings—­what Filipinos refer to asEJKs—­appearnotonlyinprintbutalsoonsocialmedia,thusexpanding the reach of the photographs to millions of Filipinos and, by extension, a global audience (Gonzales 2019). These young men and women are the eyes of “The Night Shift” (Fenton 2017). Their grueling schedules begin at nightfall. They rush to the site of a murder or multiple murders, hurrying to photograph the corpses in the dark, before the police take the dead to morgues or funeral parlors that charge the victims’ families tens of thousands of pesos with a significant cut for the police who give them business. They work in near-­impossible conditions—­low lighting; the smell of blood, sewage, and fear; and the hostility of some Philippine police—­ but they continue to share their photographs of EJKs on various media. They have won international accolades for what we have dubbed their “dark lens.” With the assistance of Manila-­based video producer Rica Concepcion, we reached out to the photographers in March 2018, and they agreed to be part of an online exhibition that would bring attention to the drug war killings. As an academic and artistic response to the violence of the Philippine state, we launched Dark Lens/Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino CamerainDuterte’sRepublic, on the website of SUNY Stony Brook’s Center for the Study of Inequalities, Social Justice, and Policy, in October 2018. The photographs were accompanied with original brief captions and poems by forty scholars, poets, and artists from the Philippines and North America. We co-­curated Dark Lens with literature and translation studies scholar Pia Arboleda (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa) and Manila-­based writer Francine Marquez. The editors were Clare Counihan and Sarita See from the Center for Art and Thought. For this Codex, we invited four scholars from the Philippines and North America to expand the captions they had written for the DarkLens exhibition : literary critic John Labella (Manila) on Lopez; art historian Caroline Baicy (Honolulu) on Santiago; political scientist Ethel Tungohan (Toronto) on Acayan; and cultural studies scholar Gary Devilles (Manila) on Lerma. As we know from the history of photography, the camera is...