The story of the last artisanal saltmakers in the Philippines
Featuring works by Geela Garcia (Philippines)
Recipient of the 7th Objectifs Documentary Award, Emerging Category
Mentored by Jessica Lim
4 April to 18 May 2025
Lower Gallery 1, Objectifs
Free admission
Opening | 4 Apr 2025, 12pm – 7pm
All life depends on Salt: An Artist talk with Geela Garcia
Sat 5 Apr 2025, 4pm – 5pm | Objectifs Workshop Space (register here)
Smoke blankets the room where Emma Ganila has been scooping brine into an assembly line of tin cans. As salt water boils and evaporates in the tins, blocks of white salt form. Emma has been making Tultul, an artisanal salt only found on Guimaras island.
On Iloilo, an island right across Emma’s, Lorlie Noblezada watches her son, John, face strong breaking waves as he collects seawater with a bamboo pole to start the process of making Budbud salt.
Emma and Lorlie are some of the last artisanal saltmakers in the Philippines. Both have been safekeeping traditional saltmaking processes for decades. However, this craft is in fast decline.
Despite a long history of saltmaking, the Philippines, an archipelago with the fifth-longest coastline in the world, has not produced enough salt for its own needs for the past 15 years. The country has some of the rarest salts in the world, including Tultul and Budbud, and it only needs to ultilise six percent of its coastline to be self-sufficient in salt. But local salts are on the brink of extinction due to unsupportive policies, industry neglect, and climate change.
The process of making artisanal salt is time-consuming and laborious, but still, Emma, at 74, spends her day inside the warm and smoky production house to cook blocks of Tultul salt; Lorlie assesses the seasons and checks if the skies are clear to schedule production of Budbud salt. For these matriarchs, this craft, as much as it is a livelihood, is what binds their families’ day-to-day living.
All life depends on salt.
About the artist
Geela Garcia is a Filipino photographer and multimedia journalist based in Manila, Philippines. Her photographic work, which documents stories of women, food sovereignty, and the environment, aims to write history from the experience of its makers.
She received the Seed Award from the Prince Claus Fund in 2023 for her photojournalism work, and is currently a Shifting Democracies Fellow at Global Press.
Geela’s writing and photography appear on the Thomson Reuters Foundation – Context News, South China Morning Post, and Rappler among others. She is a member of Women Photograph and Diversify Photo Up Next.
About the Mentor
Jessica Lim is currently the director of Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops (APFW), a non-profit association based in Cambodia. For most of her professional life, she has worked to provide support and opportunities to visual storytellers in the majority world. Her move to Cambodia built on her previous experience with Drik Picture Library in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a media organisation dedicated to advocating for social equality, where she served as a news and photo editor and photographer liaison. She majored in journalism and graduated from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore in 2006.
Jessica is currently based in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where on any given day there is a good chance of meeting water buffalos.
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About the Objectifs Documentary Award
The Objectifs Documentary Award champions Objectifs’ mission to broaden perspectives through image making, by supporting original voices in visual storytelling in Singapore and the wider region. The Award enables photographers to work on new or existing projects, encouraging them to tell stories about their native communities. It welcomes different creative approaches to non-fiction storytelling, from conventional documentary photography to visual experiments.
About the Truthseeker Foundation
The Truth Seeker Foundation believes that education and enlightenment are the best ways to address many of the social issues we face today. Amongst the many causes the Foundation supports, it advocates for raising awareness of social and environmental issues through photography.
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