ILIGAN CITY (MindaNews / 1 March) — The photobook “Kasama” was launched despite the Communist Party’s reservations. They feared it might compromise the identities of key personalities within the New People’s Army. During the launch, there was only one copy in existence.
After the event, Alex handed me that lone copy—the very book displayed at the launch. It was filled with signatures and handwritten notes from the guests. I initially refused. I felt I neither deserved nor had the right to keep something so rare, so charged with history. But Alex was emotional, insistent. I could not refuse him.
A month later, I returned to the same areas Alex had documented in Kasama, to film “A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution.” I brought the book with me, intending to show it to the combatants.
When they saw the photographs, their faces lit up. They were happy to see comrades captured in those pages. But when I asked where those comrades were now, the joy dissolved into an eerie silence. A long pause. Then, slowly, they began showing me their torture marks. Every one of them in that unit had been tortured—by their own comrades.
That regional command had been under Jorge Madlos, the first regional commander to openly admit that the Party had committed grave mistakes. He ordered the release of comrades who had been suspected as military agents.
After two months embedded with the NPA, we returned to Manila. As soon as I arrived, I called Alex. We met at Penguin Gallery—the place where artists and journalists gathered. I told him everything: what I had seen, what had happened after he left those areas. I returned the book to him, now bearing additional signatures from the New People’s Army members I had met.
He was both sad and relieved to see the only copy again. But the pain of knowing that many of the people he had photographed were gone was overwhelming. He wept. We drowned ourselves in alcohol until dawn. Then we walked to his pad to sleep.
In the morning, I quietly left while Alex was still asleep. Beside him lay his book, Kasama. Years later, I asked him about it. “I lost it,” he said.
Now, like that missing book, my dear friend, my brother—is gone.
Farewell, Balobalos Pilar!
(Jojo Sescon — Urian Arts on Facebook — posted this on his social media page on 1 March 2026. Permission to share granted to MindaNews. Jojo, like Alex, was among the young photojournalists of the mid 1980s when the mosquito press blossomed and dared to stand up against the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. He is also a film maker, a sculptor, a swimmer, and lately, an ultramarathon runner. Jojo was delighted to know that his own long lost copy of Alex’s Kasama, although with no signatures and handwritten notes, still exists, in the care of another photojournalist friend, MindaNews’ Bobby Timonera, who looked for it in his library upon seeing Jojo’s post.)
