Fishers at the Margins

Fishers at the Margins is a collection of photographs of fisherfolk and life in coastal communities I've put together at the request of the Tambuyog Development Center, an NGO working on community-based coastal resource management, for their 25th Founding Anniversary last May 31. Incidentally, the occasion also marked Philippine Fisherfolk Day and as such, the photo-essay made for a very fitting and perhaps long overdue tribute.

The photoessay's title is a wordplay on the term "marginal" (municipal or subsistence fishers) and "marginalized", which in NGO lingo refers to a certain demographic falling below the poverty line, and which in the Philippines is made up of about 90% of the population (beware bad data). Marginalized also denotes being unable to enjoy basic social services and being excluded from decision-making. The fisherfolk-1.5 million of them living and deriving their livelihood from the archipelago's 33,900 kilometers of coastline, remain, in most villages, marginalized--they are poor, disempowered, and excluded from the decision making processes which impact heavily on their lives.

They are people virtually on the margins of society, invisible almost, to most of us. But they are here.

I dedicate this to them.

Fishers at the Margins

Text and Photos:
Leonard G. Reyes

Music, ambient sound:
field recording by Joey Ayala of Isla Mahaba Fishers for the Songs of the Seas Project

Be sure to turn the slideshow audio "ON".