Death’s Capital: Urban Poor Political Ecology and the Aesthetics of Salvaging by the Nightcrawlers of Manila

Through an ecocritical analysis of the practice of photography by the Nightcrawlers of Manila, this chapter describes an urban poor political ecology under Duterte’s Oplan Tokhang that ensues along with his government’s other urban spatial policies/strategies of containing, excluding, and expelling the urban poor that have made them more vulnerable as targets of the drug war and its documentation. This violent urban metabolism has rendered/(pre)disposed the body of the urban poor into “waste/garbage,” the material-discursive products cities are known for, and where the Nightcrawlers inevitably transform their “stylized” deaths into images of the abject aesthetic of salvaging. Salvaging signifies not just the manner of killing but the interrelated livelihoods of the urban poor subject and the photographer, placing “death” as the precondition of urban living and the center of photographic practice in the Age of the Necrocene.