Southeast Asia

Individual Paper

(4) - Narco Images: Documentary Work and the Crisis of Witnessing in the Photography of the War on Drugs in the Philippines

When does seeing become an act of (un)moving? Since 2016, when the “war against drugs” was initiated by the Duterte government in the Philippines, numerous cases of extrajudicial killings have been chronicled. Filipino and foreign photojournalists troop to the scenes of encounters between the police and suspects, documenting murder and grief for all to see. Their images, remarkably both gruesome and miserable, have catapulted the anti-drug campaign to global attention as they propelled Filipino photographers to unprecedented prominence. However, no less than the country’s president has questioned the dramatic nature and authenticity of the photos; ordinary citizens have even captured the moments in celebration of the murder of “criminals.”  

The continuing “photographic debate” raises the antinomies of aesthetic and epistemic values in what are ostensibly objective and truthful records, simultaneously illumining the ethical and moral issues of documenting an ongoing crusade for and against the body politic. What are the obligations of taking and seeing pictures for both the photographers and spectating public alike? This paper studies the fraught connections of aesthetics and politics in the photographic coverage of the drug war and the attendant “crisis of witnessing” among photography’s various subjects.

Individual Paper Presenter(s)

• JM

  JPaul Manzanilla

  National University of Singapore, Philippines