Unlike other photographers who brandish their gear like fashion accessories, Bob Lim is not usually seen carrying a camera. It’s kept in the car, just in case. Or when his third eye sees something while driving, he just pulls over and grabs his camera.
Bob has been taking pictures since he was a boy, growing up with a photographer dad. Today, he owns two studios that carry his name, having been a commercial photographer in Cebu for decades now.
His clients love his delightful photographs of anything from furniture to beach resorts. Bob is also known for his portraits, taken mostly in his studio. When it comes to portraits, he wants to be in control.
Once, while visiting our friend, the late artist Tito Cuevas, I pulled out my small camera and started taking photos of the man and his place. Bob told me that normally, he preferred to have his subjects sit before him under controlled lighting in his studio. But this was months before Tito died and, perhaps, sensing the importance of that day, he went back to his car to get his camera.
We took photos of Tito quite casually even as we talked about his life, his art and the interesting objects in his studio. Later, Tito invited us to a restaurant and he told us more about his story, the not-so-known parts, teary-eyed. It was a poignant moment that eluded our cameras.
While Bob loves the Apollonian sense of control he has over his studio work, he delights in the serendipity and spontaneity of street photography. He may not look like the type but Bob is actually no stranger to the more plebeian life of the streets. He once set up his studio, Kino Boy (named after his son Kino), in Colon Street, which, he said, continues to be his “psychic Mecca.”
In streets like Colon, Bob finds what Alfred Stieglitz calls “an involvement in and a concern for life.” Bob is drawn to the authenticity and hidden beauty of ordinary existence. The ironies of urban poverty is so blatant, it can actually be obscene. It takes an artist or a poet to give these ironies more subtlety, and thus more power.
And Bob has the sensibilities of both the artist and the poet. Back in the early ‘80s, when he was studying film in UP Diliman, he roamed the streets of Manila and Cebu (when he came home for vacation) taking lots of pictures and writing prolifically about the experience. He was one of the first Cebuano poets to exploit the wit of street language and popular culture. His work was published in definitive anthologies of Cebuano poetry edited by Resil Mojares during this time.
I recall walking with Bob and other writer friends along Escario Street one evening. We stopped by one corner to eat balut, sitting next to a canal in the sidewalks. I never got a chance to join Bob and our friend Gerard Pareja—also a photographer and poet like him—in one of their photo-walks.
When going out with other photographers, it is normal to find yourself drawn to the same subjects. The ultimate challenge then is how to take a unique angle. What is it that you include or exclude in the picture? In other words, what is it that you see in the same object that others don’t.
Some views are inherently beautiful, like a sunset, a flower, building, or even a pretty face. Anybody can just take a snapshot using the usual “rule of thirds” and instantly have a beautiful picture. But as the cliché goes, photography is not about merely “taking” a photo; it is the art of “making” a picture.
Bob Lim, for instance, is keen on hidden geometry and patterns that give his pictures of even the most banal objects an abstract quality. Or he can be alert not so much for formal qualities but for wit. And in some works, as in his portraits and street photos, there’s just this sense of mystery and aura that one finds the longer one looks at the picture.
This goes beyond, what Stieglitz calls the mere “rhetoric” and “grammar” of formal composition. According to the great master of photography: “I started within myself without anything, therefore, my rhetoric was not good, my grammar was not good, but there was something there that I was developing for myself.”
In his own work, the most recent of which are featured in his solo exhibition entitled “Here,” held last June 12 to 25 at Ultra Digital Imaging, you can see how Bob follows Stieglitz in this pursuit for that “something there.” Indeed, unless one has the gift of the third eye like Bob, you can see that “something” here, there and everywhere.