Wandering eyes

Weeks from now, Cenon Norial III is about to see his first magazine cover in print  and for one of the country’s top fashion titles, no less. It is a privilege usually reserved for photographers who have counted thousands and thousands of shutter actuations, but for Cenon, it seems to have happened in a snap. At 21, he emerged as the top photographer in the second season of Mega Fashion Crew. To think, he says, “I was about to back out!”

Cenon joined the reality competition fresh out of college with nary a portfolio to speak of. But as it turned out, that’s exactly what made him stand out. “I thought I’d just experiment,” he says. “I wasn’t afraid of getting booted out. I did whatever I thought was beautiful because I knew nothing.”

Not quite. In college, Cenon founded a DIY magazine called ADHD with his best friend — an outlet for meandering eyes exploring fashion, art and music. It is only one of the recent zines to have sprouted from a new boom in self-publishing among Manila’s young creatives. Out of the bunch, however, ADHD is most distinct in covering really only what they are interested in — leaning closer to a scrapbook format than an ad-segregated pulp binding. While the others fall into the trap of almost simply copying the titles that they read, ADHD has its own unpredictable beat — much like the stream of influences it catches over the Internet. His five co-workers are all obsessed, in their own ways, with street fashion, “improper paintings” and indie music. There’s a voyeuristic feel to reading it — something very personal and not necessarily stuck to chasing the latest.

It is point-of-view that made Cenon win, after all. He’s informed by the poetic film nudes of Chinese photographer Ren Hang and the spontaneous and tongue-in-cheek take on fashion by the Dutch founder and photographer of I Fake Magazine, Jolijn Snijders. A decade ago, Cenon was just a kid following the drawing instructions to his then favorite TV show Pappyland, but today, he is scrawling his owns lines, drawing his own light — as a graphic designer by day and budding photographer by night.

His first magazine cover, in print, may seem to have come too early, but with the vast torrent of homogenized images drowning today’s audience via television, billboards and the Internet, we might just have something to learn from the eye of the innocent.

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