NC

| PROOF | A PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL
By Jeremy Berlin
Photographs by Mariusz Janiszewski
The paint is peeling. The floors are grimy. The basketball
nets are frayed. And no one seems to mind.
Children laugh and play games. Men take siestas.
Roosters strut down the hallway. In one of the
world’s most densely populated cities, life’s rich
pageant plays out on every floor.
That’s what Polish photographer Mariusz
Janiszewski found last year when he visited a
government housing project in Barangay 128, a
section of Manila’s Tondo district. Built in the
1990s near Smokey Mountain—an internationally
infamous dump that once housed more than
two million tons of trash—it’s still home to many
of the site’s former workers.
Janiszewski says he’d shot in the Philippines
before but always in a “typical documentary”
style. This time he had something else in mind.
“I wanted to show how daily life looks in an
overpopulated place like Manila,” he says, “and
how it’s lived in semi-open spaces and stairwells.”
To do that, he “chose not to take pictures from a
variety of perspectives” but to “stay in one place
and wait for the surprising and unpredictable.”
Each floor “looked like an identically designed
stage,” he says, but soon revealed a distinct milieu:
women cooking, men gambling, children
playing cards. Janiszewski returned each weekend
to document these living tableaux, capturing
scenes of family, friends, and neighbors bonding.
Mary Racelis, a social anthropologist at Ateneo
de Manila University, says that sense of community
is key in a place like Tondo. Many residents
are informal settlers, once called squatters. Long
considered second-class citizens, they’ve often
been denied jobs, housing, and basic services.
“Over the years these people have formed
networks that have enabled them to survive and
find new opportunities,” she says. With the help
of NGOs and leftist political groups, they’ve been
able to organize effectively, raise their voices, and
demand better living conditions.
What matters here, she adds, as anywhere
else, is “location, location, location … The city is
where jobs are … Those who have been moved by
the government to distant relocation sites have
found that they cannot survive there.”
Many of the available jobs today are in the informal
sector, which includes Manila’s thriving
drug cartels. For other employment opportunities,
completing high school or college is crucial.
Regardless of education level, the residents of
Barangay 128 have no shortage of two precious
commodities: hope and resilience.
The most important thing that flows from
these pictures, suggests Janiszewski, is that “despite
the odds, people here can enjoy life, and
they often have a smile on their faces. I’ve always
admired that.” j
ASIA
CHINA
VIETNAM
South
China
Sea
BRUNEI
M A L A Y S I A
Manila
TAIWAN
I N D O N E S I A
PHILIPPINES
0 mi 400
0 km 400
NGM MAPS
PACIFIC
OCEAN
a Filipino historian, says it’s rare to see children this
young smoking in the Philippines.
132 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • OCTOBER 2017