Alyssa Manalo
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 4 min read
Alyssa Manalo is an artist from Richmond, Virginia, who works with photography and experimental darkroom techniques. She explores light, time, and chemistry while testing how far materials can stretch. She combines traditional methods with unusual materials. In series like “Mordancage Series” and “Ruminations of a Sinner,” she uses her own image to examine faith, change, and personal history. Her recent work continues through new photographic experiments and installations.
Q: What first drew you to connect the body and faith in your work?
A: I was raised Catholic all my life, so I didn't know a world without Catholicism for a long time. Catholicism has very bodily rituals and philosophies that make the body an inherent part of one's religious identity. People that engage in the faith are always performing, regardless of whether they fully believe or not. We dress up for mass, we recite prayers in a specific order, we do so much to prove faith. For women, whose bodies could be argued are inherently more sinful, we must dress more modestly and be subservient to male Catholic figures like priests. When you are raised with the belief that your entire being belongs to an entity that may or may not exist, it's inevitable to connect faith to your body.
Q: You work with processes that partly transform the image, like in the “Mordancage Series.” What keeps you returning to that tension?
A: A lot of things in society are built on people’s expectations of how things should be, especially art.
I think a lot of people limit themselves and their creativity when they stick to the tried and true all the time. I love the process of seeing a piece transform into an unprecedented product that subverts expectations and pushes the boundaries of media. It makes me feel like a chemist discovering a new elemental reaction or a magician debuting a new trick.
Transformation also highly resonates with the topics I address in my work. A lot of it has to do with my frequently changing sense of identity and intrapersonal conflicts. Creating transformation-based work helps me both convey transformation physically and help me understand the scope of my own ever-changing identity.
Q: How do you decide when an image has revealed enough of itself to stop working on it?
A: I find the decision to be rather intuitive, partially because I am often not 100% in control of how the medium is working and I learned how to love the inconsistency. When creating the “Mordancage Series,” for example, it’s impossible for the veils to fall the same way out of the water as they look in the water bath. I can try to control where the veils go with some tricks with water, but they ultimately move as they please. What I can do is add to the works with some ink or photo editing and highlight what I’d like the art to reveal about itself. I especially like to have a balance of opacity and transparency to maintain a sense that there’s always more to an image than what meets the eye.
Q: In your work, the darkroom feels almost ritualistic. Where does that sense of ritual meet experimentation for you?
A: Traditional darkroom processes do feel very ritualistic and precise — I learned how to print in the darkroom with very specific times and water temperatures.
My experimentation lies in breaking and reconfiguring that ritual. Sometimes I add in new chemicals, develop an image only halfway, expose photographic paper to different lights, and even more. I guess in this sense, the ritual is less like a traditional darkroom and more like a butchered scientific method, with lots of trials, variables, failures, and all the like. Honestly, the more I discover the broader possibilities of printing with darkroom supplies and chemicals, my process has become increasingly chaotic and not as ritualistic or streamlined as typical darkroom printing. It feels more authentic to me that way.
Q: When you use yourself as a subject, what feels different in how you see the body?
A: Every body has its own artifacts — i.e. unique scars, bruises, stretch marks — from living with one’s own identity. Using someone else’s body doesn’t convey the same experience that using my own body does. A body is unique in that it is a product of all those who came before you and all that has happened to you. I can take photos of another twenty-something Filipina as the subject, but she would not understand my full lived experience and how every interaction has affected my being. She would have her own story to tell instead. Shooting self-portraits such as those in “Ruminations of a Sinner” also helps me embody a character that I achieve only through channeling a hyperbolized version of my personal experience. I can’t explain how to feel to someone else. It’s impossible to describe. I can only really feel it.
Q: What do materials like film, light, and gelatin prints let you express that painting couldn’t?
A: Film and silver prints, unlike painting, capture a 100% to-scale image of reality, void of the human perspective. It captures the fact of invisible light waves passing through reality. This way, I can take a true representation of reality and distort it. Whereas with painting, the artist encounters the challenge of creating the distorted reality in one go. The transformation happens in the mind rather than in the physical world. Paintings do a wonderful job of expressing human perception, but they do not necessarily hold the essence of truth inside them. I also really like the balance of control between myself and the photographic medium. It’s often a surprise as to what a photograph will look like through analog methods — you make the work long before you see the product. With additive mediums like painting and ceramics, you are seeing the work as you make it, which I sometimes enjoy, but it just doesn’t evoke the same sense of unpredictability and spontaneity that photographic processes do.
