To Filipinos, the Pope is a rockstar with divine status. One-part cultural icon and one-part direct link to God, the Head of the Catholic Church is far from a distant figure in the Vatican — he’s someone we’ve forged a powerful parasocial bond with. Every papal visit is a national event, and when Pope Francis came to the Philippines in 2015, the country practically hit pause. Filipinos found themselves in a frenzy, counting down the days and preparing to welcome Papa Francesco like a long-lost lolo.
For Filipino photographer Tammy David, the papal visit was a rare opportunity to capture intimate visuals of the Head of the Catholic Church — an occasion not seen in the Philippines for over 20 years, since the last Pope’s visit. However, one big problem arose: she couldn’t get anywhere near the Pope.
“I was so sad because I didn’t get any assignments,” said David. “No publication hired me because all the big photographers, the big guns, were here in town to cover [the visit]. Usually I even get the local assignments, but this time, everyone wanted to shoot the Pope. And me, siguro, I was somewhere down the food chain.”
Although David couldn’t get press access to any of Pope Francis’ main events during his Philippine visit, she was still determined to find a way to document the experience. “I told myself I’d still show up,” said David. “I’ll still shoot. Hopefully, I take amazing photos and somebody buys them.”
On January 15, 2015, during the Pope’s meet-and-greet event at the SM Mall of Asia (MOA) Arena, David found herself walking outside around the nearby SMX Convention Center, trying to find a way to take photographs. While David had hoped to take some photos of the Pope, even in his Pope Mobile, nothing was going according to plan.
“I got there early, but my God! No signal!” David shared. “And it was really hot. And I was alone, since most of my colleagues were in nice spots and inside in the aircon. I had my ladder, my camera gear, my rain gear, my snacks, my lens. I was just walking around and feeling sorry for myself. The whole day I was just grumbling, ‘Someday, I’m going to be the kind of photographer who gets to go inside.’”
But the tide turned for David when she spotted a woman wearing a shirt that made her stand out in the crowd.
“It had an iron-on [photo] of this woman and her family, with the Pope cut out behind them,” said David. “It was so funny. But you know what, it meant something to her. The pope merited an iron-on sticker and a shirt to be ironed on. So I took a photo.”
From there, David just kept walking up to Pope Francis devotees and taking pictures of their shirts. One shirt had the Pope staring with “crazy eyes,” as David described them. Another shirt read “The Pope Gives Hope” in a Tumblr-esque font. Another saw a hand-drawn image of the Pope making the rock-and-roll hand sign, or “Rak En Rol” as the shirt humorously spelled out.
The Pope shirt photos didn’t stay on David’s Sony RX100 camera for long. “I’m a geriatric millennial,” joked David. “Oversharing online is something that I’m always comfortable with. So I was just flooding Instagram with all these Pope shirts.”
‘Pope Francis. Our Idol, Our Rockstar’
David didn’t think much of her Pope shirt photos. She saw them as more of a lighthearted distraction and a consolation for a day that wasn’t unfolding quite as she had hoped. So when her editor from The Wall Street Journal reached out to ask if the American newspaper could use her photos, David was more than shocked. “In my head, I was like, ‘My God, shirts?’” David said. “Here I am trying to get a photo of the Pope and do amazing Pope coverage and all the Wall Street Journal wants are my shirts.”
David agreed, unsure of what would come from it. To her surprise, the photos quickly gained traction and went viral. “One thing led to another,” said David. “I got a request from GMA News. My friend Lou Albano was the editor of Coconuts Manila at the time, so she wrote about the shirts too.”
David’s Pope shirt photos were even included in an art zine made by David’s friend, multi-hyphenated writer Clara Balaguer. Balaguer added David’s photos in a zine centered around the Filipino arts and sold it at the 2017 LA Art Book Fair. The zines quickly sold out, and one copy found its way into the collection of the prestigious Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive.
When asked what drew her to the Pope shirts, David explained that it wasn’t just their humor that caught her eye. “You could obviously see the care they put into these shirts,” said David. “Some were ironed on, others were hand painted. Others were cut out by hand. A few were actual designs that they paid for, bought from the mall or the ABS-CBN shop.”
“That proves that Pope Francis is really on a Kendrick Lamar-level of fame in the Philippines,” added David. “We wear these shirts to express our love for our idol, and it’s just fitting that in a Catholic country like the Philippines, Pope Francis is our idol. Our rockstar. Just thinking of those shirts makes me smile.”
“Popes are like grandfathers in this country,” continued David. “And with Pope Francis, well, even non-Catholics have good stuff to say about him. He’s very progressive. What he says matters. And even if the die-hard Catholics get upset by him, that just means the Pope is doing something right. He is aware of what’s happening and you really feel like he’s a true human being.”
Today, David reflects on the unexpected impact of her Pope shirt photographs. “I covered important events, did very important work for beauty pageants, but I will be remembered for these shirts,” mused David.
“But they’re one of the things I’m most proud of,” she continued. “I get excited because I still have work that’s being appreciated or passed around or it’s memorable. That’s the best honor. That’s the best compliment as a photographer, if someone remembers your work. And I’m glad, because if I had shot a photo of the Pope, I don’t know if people would have remembered that photo. But people remember those damn shirts.”
