Some time between two to five in the afternoon, industrial designer Rommel Lugada would park his car at the Quezon City Memorial Circle, pointing the lens of his compact camera at a fallen leaf.
He’d watch how the afternoon sun would render soft shadows on the park’s red tiles, settling momentarily on the grid-like patterns in the children’s playground. He once captured his shadow and called it a self-portrait. The image, which he titled “The Artist at Work,” won him an honorable mention at the 2018 One Shot Competition at the International Photography Awards (IPA). Last April 16, he had bagged another honorable mention at the London International Creative Competition — the latest among his growing list of prizes.
“Design Patterns” was made by manipulating a single photograph to create varying patterns
“(What I like in photography is) anywhere I go, there is something (to capture). I find the environment, a natural environment na wala akong inaayos,” says Lugada. He sits across me in a relatively empty restaurant tucked in the middle of QMC. Like a typical professor —he teaches at the College of Saint Benilde — he had prepared a Powerpoint for our meeting. “In photography, ica-capture ko lang ang vision ko,” he continues. “Doon ako nagsisimula.”
Notwithstanding the awards, Lugada evidently recoils at the thought of calling himself a photographer.
Lugada’s “Romance” won silver at the 2017 International Photography Awards Philippines and was included in the International Photography Awards Book in 2017
Having majored in industrial design at the University of Santo Tomas, Lugada has devoted most of his career to designing and educating. After graduating, he spent the next few decades at the Design Center of the Philippines, helping regional manufacturers develop their local products for the market. He then worked at a product design and manufacturing agency in Indonesia for six years before returning to the Philippines.
“I’m happy with my career and service,” he says really solemnly, “but I feel that my style is too commercial. Although my style is there (there are other factors that take precedence): Dapat bumenta, dapat makipag-compete, pero wala ‘yong personal touch. (It’s always about) what is the trend, and what are the factors involving the materials.”
“Prisma”
Once, stuck in Manila traffic on his way home from work, the designer took a detour to QMC. He started shooting the natural environment, noticing how the blades of grass created a rhythmic visual pattern, and how the afternoon light rendered transient shadows on a stark array of lines.
One of his works, “Gemini,” won him a number of awards, including an honorable mention at the 2017 Tokyo International Foto Awards’ abstract category and the accolade “Fine Art Photographer of the Year” at the 2017 International Photography Awards Philippines. Inspired by polyptych art, the work collages monochromatic photos taken of a single plant at different times of the day in QMC, utilizing natural patterns for abstraction and design composition. Even in his works that feature the built environment—the circular structures and the red rectangular prisms at Eton Centris—Lugada decidedly approaches photography with the eye of a designer tracking down rhythm and repetition.
“Zamia”
So few of his works feature a human character. Once, he shot a worker with a bucket of paint standing on scaffolding, its silhouettes creating new patterns on the white wall behind. He titled it “The Painter.” Asked why he prefers patterns over portraits, the designer says, “because I don’t like directorial jobs. This is the challenge for me: Alam mo na any time puwede lumipad ‘yong grasshopper. You capture it, you capture the moment.”
In listening to him talk about design in nature, you get the sense that the symmetry and balance — which he so obsessively tries to capture and which can sometimes feel too controlled — also convey Lugada’s introverted gaze, in the sense that the image isn’t derived from a photographer’s intervention, but is simply the product of someone looking. “What I would like is to share with you what I saw,” he says, “not what I would like you to see.”
Photographer Rommel Lugada
For someone who’s spent his career designing and constructing, here Lugada prefers no elaborate directorial cues. Apart from chasing patterns, photography to him is observation, to work with light and to work with chance. “What I tell my (design) students,” he says, “is you’re not a photographer; you’re a designer here. It doesn’t matter kung ano ‘yong dala mo; it’s how you compose and frame the image.”