25 years later, we remember

MANILA, Philippines - With photographs, we remember what the mind forgets.

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the EDSA People Power revolution, 60 photographs by American photojournalist Kim Komenich, including those for which he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, will be on exhibit at the Ayala Museum from Feb. 22 to March 5. Komenich will also hold a lecture on the exhibit, which is called “Revolution Revisited,” on Feb. 26.

President Aquino, whose late mother Corazon Aquino was catapulted to the presidency after the four-day peaceful revolt, will be the special guest at the opening of the exhibit today, the Ayala Foundation said.

During the period leading to the People Power Revolution, Kim Komenich was a photographer for the San Francisco Examiner with reporter Phil Bronstein. His images provide a poignant glimpse of People Power, one of the most significant periods in Philippine contemporary history.

“Revolution Revisited” will be accompanied by the first leg of “Looking Back: 1986 People Power at EDSA,” a yearlong exhibition series featuring items from the Aquino Museum in Tarlac which is currently being renovated.

Said Ayala Foundation executive vice president Guillermo Luz: “More than half of Filipinos today were born after 1986 and do not have a memory of People Power. A significant number of people may have been too young at the time. Photographs are a powerful tool for remembering and understanding. With Kim Komenich’s images, we hope to provide the public with a visually engaging experience of these historic moments — and perhaps reinvigorate our sense of national solidarity and pride in being Filipino.”

“Revolution Revisited,” is supported by Kim Komenich, the Edsa People Power Commission, the Ninoy and Cory Aquino Foundation, Ayala Corp., Bank of the Philippine Islands, Canon and the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkley.

The photographer

Kim Komenich is professor of new media at San Jose State University and co-founder (with documentary photographer Rick Rocamora) of San Francisco Exposure Gallery. Komenich worked as a staff photographer and editor for the San Francisco Chronicle (2000-2009) and the San Francisco Examiner (1982-2000.) He was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography for photographs of the Philippine Revolution he made while on assignment for the Examiner. 

Komenich has photographed the ramifications of conflict in the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, the former Soviet Union and most recently in Iraq, where photos from his three trips to the Sunni Triangle in 2005 earned him the Military Reporters and Editors’ Association’s 2006 Photography Award for large circulation newspapers. 

He has received the 1987 Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the 1981 World Press Photo News Picture Story Award, and three National Headliner Awards. Komenich’s multimedia story “94607: Oakland’s Childhood Asthma Hotspot,” part of Newsdesk.org’s “Bay Area Toxic Tour” won the 2009 national Sigma Delta Chi award for online journalism.  

His current project “Revolution Revisited,” a 25th anniversary look back at the 1986 Philippine “People Power” Revolution, appears in 2011 as a movie, a book and an iPad application as well as a series of photographic exhibitions in the Philippines and the United States. Komenich and producers Rick Rocamora and Jessica Sison have made three trips to the Philippines since August 2010 to search for some of the subjects in his 1986 photos and interview them about their lives since “People Power.” 

The “Revolution Revisited” book, movie and application are scheduled for release on Aug. 21, 2011.