OF the Filipino photographers making an indelible mark in the local and international scenes, Lope Navo’s life story is the most fascinating. His career trajectory is nothing short of inspiring.
At only 36, his remarkable résumé includes campaigns for Mossimo and Bench, covers for Factice Paris, Fiasco UK, Playgirl New York, L’Officiel Dubai, L’Officiel Hommes Korea, Têtu Paris, Esquire Asia and Rodeo Italy. A career highlight is his 2013 shoot for Christian Dior’s Lady Dior “As Seen By” exhibition, which saw him display his work alongside such industry greats as Peter Lindbergh, Nan Goldin, Patrick Demarchelier, Bruce Weber, Paolo Roversi, Camilla Akrans, Ellen Von Unwerth, Jean-Baptisite Mondino and Inez & Vinoodh.
I met Navo years ago through fashion director Ariel Lozada in one of his intermittent stops in Manila, between jobs that took him to Dubai, Miami, Malibu, New York, Brazil and Berlin. Last week we reconnected over afternoon snacks hosted by couturier Michael Cinco (“I’m always impressed with Navo’s work.”).
So, an interview-cum-catching up ensued. Though he has blazed trails for Filipino photographers, he still has lots of unrealized potential. From now on, the Fil-American Lope Navo wants his professional name to be “Navo.” Just like Rihanna, Cher and, of course, Madonna.
Here he is, in his own words—unadulterated, raw, unfiltered:
ORIGINS AND BEGINNINGS
I was a classically trained painter. So from the start, I’ve been a visual storyteller. I’m a fine arts graduate, that was my basic training: art and beauty. My first big paychecks came from selling my oil paintings right after college. Coming from an unprivileged background in a Third World setup, I worked hard from the very start, but I used art as my tool to survive. I wasn’t given so much cards to deal with, so I first used beauty as my light, first with the paintbrush and then my camera.
That’s why Photoshop was really an extension of my work from the beginning. It is like an electronic paintbrush that gives a painter-ly feel to my earlier works. Although my new works are more raw and closer to what my camera produces, I’m exposed to the full spectrum of all kinds of styles of photography out there, from classic to modern to the obscure and un-classifiable, having had the opportunity to live in North and South America and in the heart of Europe for decades.
I think fashion for people like me, a very dark-skinned, Third World-born homosexual, is some sort of an armor against all the social constructs that has been built against me. I made lemonades with each and every lemon that has been given to me by default. It wasn’t easy.
My nice clothes are secondhand mostly. I wish a dark-skinned person can walk around Europe looking like a homeless person, and still be perceived “Kurt Cobain” punk, not as an illegal immigrant or a homeless person. So fashion for people like me in its most basic truth is an armor: to look good, based on appearances, is to be accepted in many of the institutions that has been built against me, being born like me. Fashion for me has more meaning than most.
Growing up from a poor family from a Third World, in every meaning of the word, I’m basically a “nobody.” But America gave me hope as a young man. America gave me a voice as a photographer, everything I am became experiences themselves and not just records of someone else’s opinions. I’m alive.
I knew that photography can be a job when I met art photographer Robert Polidori in Dubai, shooting the Burj Al Arab for Vanity Fair with a large-format camera. We talked over coffee by the beach for hours about the photography life in New York City and that sparked my interest to move to New York and try my luck.
CHALLENGES AND ADVERSITIES
Being born a dark-skinned Third World homosexual is a gift. It triggered my curiosity for survival and later obsession toward beauty and truth.
An “immigrant” basically means you just moved your geographic location—you were right over there, and now you are right over here. Some people live outside of a system in most modern societies, lower tier than refugees, no housing, no health care, no identity, but they do exist. They are doing great things, almost superhumanly.
My journey has not been the easiest thing. It was an emotional roller-coaster, to say the least. My love affair with Western society tested my resilience as a human being, and I honestly don’t feel (many people) would genuinely understand the cards I’d been dealt with—just by being me, looking the way I look, my external package as a human being.
INFLUENCES AND FAVORITES
MY influences change through time and these days my inspiration is life itself, nature and some memories of my earlier days of being obsessed with magazines.
I’ve met Terry Richardson, Greg Gorman and David La Chapelle in person and I’ve chatted for hours with Bruce Weber about art and photography. I will always be a fan of their work and aesthetic.
I feel like Steven Klein has so much sparks of influences in my work, too, I am almost a hybrid of most American fashion photographers.
I loved working with model Tony Ward in the early-2000s and I shot him for the cover of Digital Photographer. He told me that my work reminds him of Richard Avedon. I was very young back then and that was one of the biggest compliments I got from someone I respect from the industry.
Tony Ward has worked with the greats and I respect his longevity and tenacity. I loved working with Christian Dior and L’Officiel Magazine in Rio de Janeiro. It was probably a Cinderella story for me, just for being who I am. I had to say no to a magazine cover shoot with Daniel Radcliffe in London at that same week, where he personally handpicked my work from a bunch of other young and talented photographers presented to him.
Nowadays it’s easier to be a photographer, because photography has evolved into this mechanical thing now, rather than the viscera or the emotions of a human being, his experiences.
AESTHETIC AND PHILOSOPHY
I’m not going to pretend I’m an original. I’m a hybrid of many of the photographers that came before me and inspired me, but my journey is different from theirs, since I have lived all over the world and did not just stick to one city or one place.
My aesthetic is classically trained in New York, but with strong touches of many of the cultural backgrounds I have lived in, not only visited as a tourist but as an actual local, as one of them.
PLANS AND PROJECTS
I’m hoping to wrap up my series of short stories and poetry that’s collectively a swashbuckling teen novel, and also some photobooks/coffee-table books about the most beautiful men that inspired me and continue to inspire me as a young man, wherever my journey takes me next.
The good days bring you happiness and the bad ones give you experience. I still have so much unrealized potential at my age. I still have too many photographs to take, and too many pages still to write, too many men to still love. Up to this day, beauty and truth are my only armor in this world, and these have given me so much that I could ever ask for.
I would like to be the first of my kind to ever shoot for a Vogue magazine cover, knowing that it’s not easy to have that equal opportunity to be represented in that field, to have a voice.