2 Codex Nerissa S. Balce and Sarita Echavez See Exposing EJKs and the State: A Collaborative Review of Dark Lens/Lente ng Karimlan: Te Filipino Camera in Duterte’s Republic In May 2016, the Philippines began a new era of state-sanctioned death documented by a new visual technology: the digital camera. Under the leadership of the nation’s sixteenth president, Rodrigo Roa Duterte, a drug war was launched as part of Duterte’s plan to end illegal drug use and drug trade. Te new Philippine president believed that crimi- nals, such as drug users and drug pushers, were “animals” who should be killed without due process (Berehaluk 2016; Goodman and Liwanag 2017). Te elimination of criminal elements has been rationalized as a purging necessary for creating the new strongman’s version of the modern republic. Since its unleashing, Duterte’s drug war has claimed more than twenty-fve thousand deaths, with more than 40 percent of the killings committed in Manila, the Philippine capital. Scholars have described this humanitarian crisis as a genocide of the poor (Coronel et al. 2018; Siman- gan 2018). Most of the dead are from the urban slums—men, women, teenagers, and children who were shot or killed in the cross fre, their bodies found in sewers; on dimly lit side streets; at busy intersections; by sari-sari (corner) stores; and in jeepneys, on motorcycles, and in cars. Some corpses bear the marks of torture; some have their heads wrapped in duct tape so that identifying them has been impossible. Corpses have been found with handwritten signs in Filipino that say “I am a drug pusher.” Since the drug killings, a new generation of Filipino photographers, in the tradition of journalists during the Marcos dictatorship, have emerged to record the horror of the Philippine state. Te essays for this Codex discuss the work Manila-based photographers Eloisa Lopez, Br. Ciriaco thirty