Ili: bringing back culture to where it belongs

By Arianne Julaton

(March 2017)

Bartolome Tommy Hafalla has brought back the ili to the ili. Because after all, the ili is who you are,
the ili is where you belong.

A Baguio-based photographer, Hafalla has been capturing the lives of different ethnolinguistic groups in
the Cordilleras. He has brought the forgotten, sacred, unseen, and divine rituals and adapting lives of
the Cordillerans to different places. This is to share the little that he knows about the Cordilleras.

Last March 12, 2017 at Hill Station, Casa Vallejo, he launched the book Ili, a book containing black and
white photo documentation of the Cordilleran culture. The book is right where it belongs said
Padmapani Perez, an anthropologist who is a contributor of the book. The book shows the everyday life
in the Cordilleras. Rituals, beliefs, and women and men clad in their traditional attire and tattoos are
shown. It speaks of the concepts of the Cordillera regarding death, birth, and blessings from their
ancestors where some of which are barred from the outer worlds eyes.

The ili is who you are. Ili refers to ones place of origin, or home village. The book provides a
redefinition of people towards their place of origin as people tend to forget what lies before
modernization took place, before the colonizers diluted our country.

Hafalla also made the film Dangtey. It shows the ritual of the people from Sagada performed once every
ten years. The people mark the boundaries of Sagada and call upon the living and the dead souls of the
Sagada people to come back to their respective dap-ays (open meeting place) to be in solidarity with the
community. The script was written by Jimmy Fong and the film was edited by David Valera.

Teaching photography to the locals for free and bringing students to immerse in the local community in
the Cordilleras are some examples of his projects. He also published two volumes of Cordillera Images: A
Collection of Photographs in 1994 and 1996.

Hafalla has given back to his country by providing people with a glimpse of how the simple lives of the
Cordillerans are lived extraordinarily, as compared to our fast-paced and temporary world. He has
helped, somehow, in materializing our cultural identity that does not solely rely on the colonizers
influences.

However, Hafalla argues that culture is not meant to be preserved, but sustained. Di mo naman
pwedeng ilagay sa freezer yan (You cannot put that in the freezer), he said. Culture, as shown in his
recently book Ili, is ever changing. Culture also adapts to the modern world, but does not necessarily
disown its origins.

Hafalla was not always a photographer. He graduated as an airplane mechanic. In an interview, he said
that he was about to report to his job in an aviation center, when he decided to come home to Baguio.
He felt that he does not belong there, so he left his dreams of becoming a pilot. Coming to Baguio
without a job, he was offered to join a medical team to Mount Pulag. Up there, I was engulfed into the
majestic Cordillera, he said. He also said that going up the mountain completed the feeling of coming
home.

By then, he wanted to venture into the arts. How I wish I could write, how I wish I could paint, or play a
melody at that, Hafalla said. However, since he was more trained in the

technical aspects in engineering school, he decided to venture in to photography which is a more

realistic medium for him.

Hafalla started by borrowing cameras from his friends and family. Little by little, he taught himself how
to operate a camera by reading books about photography in libraries. He also added that since
developing film was an expensive process back then, he used an alternative photographic process. He
uses the suns UV rays as a light source in exposing film with iron salts which he called a cyanotype.
Now, he does his own developing and his own printing.

When asked what tips he could share, he said that there are no secrets in photography. He said that one
only needs to keep it simple, focus on your subject, and know your subject.

He is a teacher. Someone who teaches things that one cannot learn from school or in any institutions.
Truly, he is one of the legends one who brings culture back to its people.