A personal gift takes on more meaning as time goes by.

I arrived in San Francisco, California in December of 1972 as a new immigrant from the Philippines after Martial Law was declared by President Ferdinand E. Marcos. I never had the chance to see the City. My priority was to get a job as soon as I can. After a week of adjustments, I started looking for a job hoping that not to be underemployed or forced to work on something that I don't have any training at all.

Luckily, after a series of interviews from different companies arranged by employment agencies, I was hired as a pharmaceutical salesman by a small company based in New Jersey selling contraceptive jelly, diaphragms, and medication for vaginitis. After two weeks of looking, I started a new challenge on January 1, 1973. 

As a new immigrant to one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I never had the chance to appreciate its unique characteristic nor photograph its tourist attractions and the daily life on the streets. At the time, I had never owned a camera, an SLR, or even a high-end instamatic. I was focused on earning a living, trying to find my way around using a map, and driving an eight-cylinder golden two-door Chevy Impala as my company car.

In many years of working in the pharmaceutical industry, winning awards and traveling all over the United States for work and pleasure, I never had the chance to be a tourist in San Francisco, to photograph its beauty and grandeur.

Even though I was being recognized with awards and bonuses, living a corporate life was a challenge, soon becoming monotonous and meaningless.

Ed Gerlock, then a Maryknoll priest who was deported by Marcos, bought me my first SLR camera. This became my creative outlet from my increasingly less meaningful occupation.

Without any formal training, I started to spend my free time working as a photojournalist getting my work published on various news outlets.

In 1991, I started my career as a documentary photographer full-time, travelling to Asia, Africa and North America, working on visual stories that have been published, exhibited and presented to audiences in different formats and forums.

In December of 2012, I received a gift of an iPhone 4 from my good friend Jun Factoran. As the iPhone was being promoted as an alternative tool to document moments of our lives, I put it to a test in 2013 when I was in Oakland for a long period of time. I decided to document San Francisco using an iPhone 4. 

The city had welcomed me 40 years before as a new immigrant, but I never had the chance to know her streets and favorite destinations with an eye of a practicing visual documentarian. I left my DSLR at home and walk around San Francisco making images using an iPhone 4.

The body of work I did about San Francisco using an iPhone 4 was published by the San Francisco Chronicle and other news outlets and exhibited at the Hipstamatic Corporate Headquarters in San Francisco

As I looked back at past work for my retrospective, these images have taken on more meaning with the passing of Jun Factoran, my batchmate in the Sigma Rho fraternity and a very good friend. I no longer use the iPhone 4 but the images I made with it, are memories to last a lifetime and beyond.