“Shutter Stories,” a photo exhibit highlighting diverse experiences of Manila’s approximately 45,000 Indians and 115,000 Koreans will open at The Block, SM North, Quezon City, from 22 to 28 August 2011.
In this exhibition, five Indian and four Korean youths share their photo essays about the lives of migrant cultural minorities living in Manila. They feature a broad range of people–from the Filipino-Indian celebrity Sam YG to Korean student dormers in UP–and an equally broad range of topics–from an Indian’s reflection on “five-six” to a Korean’s bouts with being homesick.
Two migrant community groups in Manila: Khalsa Diwan Manila, Inc. and the United Korean Association in the Philippines (UKCA), and the Konrad Adenauer Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University (ACFJ) support the project.
These visual narratives offer its local Filipino viewers the opportunity to see the migrants in their midst beyond the popular stereotypes of the Indian “bumbay” and the Korean “invader.”
This exhibition is part of the doctoral research of Mr. Jason Cabanes (PhD Scholar, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, UK). His work seeks to explore the possibility of photography as a way for Manila’s migrants to tell their own stories about their life in the city.
Prior to this exhibition, Mr. Cabanes, Ms. Cheryl Borsoto (Coordinator, Visual Journalism Program, Konrad Adenauer Asian Center for Journalism at Ateneo) and Mr. Jimmy Domingo (Former Chair and Present Board Member, Philippine Center for Photojournalism) engaged the five Indian and four Korean participants in a seminar-workshop series on Basic Photography, Photo Narratives, and Photo Selection.
