LUCENA CITY—When 78-year-old Felimon Pita returned to Lucena City in Quezon province in early 2000 after more than two decades of working in the United States, he first went to the sprawling Perez Park to meet his former buddies.
“Most of them were all gone. Some had already died, others were sick from old age and the rest just clinging on to what was left of the trade just to survive,” Pita recalled.
Pita was once president of the defunct Perez Park Photographers Association, which was founded in the 1960s and composed of litratistas plying their trade at the park in front of the old Capitol building. The members were fixtures there from dawn to dusk, ready to click away their SLR (single lens reflex) cameras at strollers for souvenir photos.
“With a deposit of P2 or sometimes less, we took photos of park visitors. After a few hours or at the agreed date, we gave them their newly developed black-and-white photos for which the customer paid in full,” Pita said.
He recalled that the photographers would often serve as guides and lead visitors to the park’s beautiful spots as background for their shots. “We even coached our customers on how to execute striking poses,” he added.
The club members, he said, had their suki (regular customers), mostly house helpers spending their day off.
Empowering visitors
All of them are now history. Pita said, citing the advent of the iPhone and digicam. Visitors themselves take the photos.
“The park photographer is now getting extinct,” the old man lamented.
Pepe Gonzales, 79, still waits for park guests on one of the metal benches. An antiquated film-fed camera hangs around his neck.
In the good old days, Gonzales said, earning P200 to P400 a day was peanuts. Now, he often ends the day without any client.
The 82-year-old Perez Park is one of the original sunken parks in the country. Stretching four blocks, it is frequented by students rehearsing dance routines.
Rehabilitation
A manmade cave at the center also doubles as a bandstand where top musicians in the 1920s and 1930s used to perform for free to residents occupying two shaded galleries. However, in early 2000, the galleries were demolished when the park underwent rehabilitation during the administration of then Gov. Wilfrido Enverga.
The original sunken design was lost when the ground was flattened and the street between the first and second blocks was reclaimed as an event area. But most of the time, the place serves as parking space.
Protests from the city residents forced the provincial government to shelve its plan to alter the other original low-level features of the other blocks. “But damage had already been done. They already destroyed the original beauty of the park,” Pita said.
A stone map of Quezon, made up of boulders representing the municipalities, and a shrine in the middle of a fishpond with concrete images of a teacher, policemen, road workers and white-collar state employees are found in the park.
Going digital
Incumbent Gov. David Suarez restored the popular colored jet fountain in front of the monument of the late President Manuel L. Quezon.
Enrique Ramos, 64, who joined the park photographers in 1990, is trying to ride the digital explosion. He showed a secondhand point-and-shoot camera that he bought for P2,000 during a pawnshop auction.
But even with a digital camera, getting a customer is a daily struggle, Ramos said. To earn extra, he does carpentry work in construction projects.
For Eddie Montenegro, 51, who bought his first digicam for P27,000, the shift from film to micro SD (storage disk) or CF (compact flash) card is inevitable.
Now sickly, he hoped that professional park photographers can still bounce from oblivion. He reminded visitors that a momentous event taken by professional photographers was much superior in quality and context than that haphazardly taken with a cell phone.
“A faded but beautiful photo in a frame is more memorable and exciting to look at than just being one of many photo files in a personal computer or cell phone,” Pita philosophized.