With pictures sporting folds and creases, a group promoting gender equality and rights launched a photo awareness campaign at the Ishmael Bernal Gallery, UP Film Center. Stating that love knows no gender boundaries, the group, known as the Pink Rockers, is aiming to establish what Boy George has declared in the eighties: Love is Love.
Entitled “Love Rocks. Love Unfolds”, the photos show tender moments of affection, with the images depicting not only the strong emotional bonds between couples, but also the underlying strength and beauty that can be found in a life of single blessedness.
The pictures, printed on plain A3 paper, were folded into origami hearts and then unfolded to reveal the lines and grooves. May it be gay, lesbian, straight or even self-love – the folds and the creases depict the path and the painstaking process of reaching a complete whole.
Pink Rockers’ Mark Baul, the creative director of the photoshoot, hatched the idea of presenting the pictures with all their creases. “We are constantly bombarded with images of hearts, cupids, and roses representing love. That’s not what love is. To know love; we need to unfold it to understand it. As we unfold the hearts and the images begin to appear, we are telling that love is more than a heart shape. It is an activity and it has an organic flow that cannot be dictated by norms,” he said.
According to Tin F. Garcia, painter and one of the three driving forces behind Pink Rockers, “the drive and inspiration for this photoshoot came from the many surprising victories on marriage equality the past year and as more people are coming out proudly with their sexuality or expressing their support for equality, the more we realize that we are all similar regardless who we love.”
She added that “though the topic of marriage equality still seems so far-fetched in the Philippines, we are hoping that these pictures, based on the very basic emotion of love – we can point out that we share the same needs and desires. From there, we can move the discussion to non-discrimination and hopefully develop a better and deeper appreciation of the diversity around us. ”
The photos exhibited at the “Love Rocks. Love Unfolds” campaign will be uploaded on the group’s Facebook page.
