For Tarzeer Pictures’ Projection Night for our works from the 18th Angkor Photo Festival, my fellow Filipino participants and I were each asked to talk about our projects and how they came to be. In my nervousness I ended up writing the entire thing ahead of the event so I wouldn’t end up rambling as I usually do. Below is an edited version of the short address.
When I got into the Angkor Photo Workshops, I was really determined to push my work and myself further. It also came at the perfect time because in the past few years I had started to interrogate my work. I was struggling to get a better grasp of what I was taking photos of and where I was shooting from; over the course of my career I had gotten used to shooting stories assigned to me, or executing visions by someone else. I’d really been meaning to do something more personal, but I couldn’t identify what it was that I wanted to talk about.
In the story pitch I submitted in my application for Angkor, I drew lines between Cambodia’s and the Philippines’ dark histories in the hands of strongman figures, and how this may have led to similar skewed senses of masculinity, ones that are heavily tethered to notions of violence, punishment, and justice. I wanted to find manifestations of these in Siem Reap’s daily life, and more importantly, document how they are subverted. I guess this was jumping off the themes I had also explored in my previous work, “Tenderness”: how to be open, how to be soft, what it means to be a man. This was personal to me, too, after witnessing so many forms of violence and injustices in my photojournalistic work over the last several years, and also in my life, at home, especially very recently. So that was the headspace I had going into Angkor. I had no specific images or execution in mind, but that was the general idea I was working with, which would later be tested and stretched and transformed.
“Hounding” I feel was something I came to and found, versus something I intentionally constructed. My process for it was different than my usual in that, instead of starting with a given prompt or assignment, here I just set out onto the streets and took whatever images spoke to me. Initially I had a lot of images of the kids I encountered on my walks, and so I thought that was a story I could work on. I was reluctant about it at first because (and I said this at one of our daily group presentations) I don’t even like kids. I hate them. Or at least that’s what I would tell myself. But I had all these images of kids — I was drawn to their innocence and joy.
After this session, one of our facilitators pulled me aside and consoled me because I think I made it pretty clear how unhappy I was with what I had so far. She said a lot of things that I needed to hear. That maybe I took these photos because I see something I want, that I see in kids something I’ve lost. She helped me realize the ways our photos hold up mirrors to us and reveal us. That’s something I held onto for the entirety of the process.
I was also really taken by the advice of one of the mentors, Antoine d’Agata, who really insisted that we take ourselves out of our comfort zones. More than that, he wanted to see in our pictures that we were subjecting ourselves to something, that there was something at stake. Yes, we were scared, but what then? What do we do with that fear? So I leaned into things I was quite literally afraid of — being lost, being in the dark, and being alone — and saw what images would come to me then.
On, I think, the third day of the workshop, I began shooting at night. As in, I would go out by myself and wander around in the dark with just a flashlight. I would purposefully walk into dark, quiet streets that really scared me, point my light at spaces I felt were looking back at me. I photographed the animals I saw and some of the very few people I ran into. Everything was different in the dark. Eventually it felt like I was simply documenting my excursions into this lightless, mapless version of Siem Reap and my encounters with its creatures.
As the days went by, I also realized how drawn I was to images of gore and ruin. I couldn’t understand why at first, and at some point I even voiced out to the mentors how afraid I was of the images I was coming up with. Is this darkness, this violence, who I am? But that’s where I also found my answer, and somehow, I found myself back where I’d started: I had known I was coming from a land of violence and stepping into a land haunted by its violent past, too. And then there was my own proximity with violence in my personal history. These were in the images that spoke to me in the city. I wondered: where does the world’s darkness end and mine begin?
While I was shooting in the night, I couldn’t not think about the supernatural. I thought there’d be ghosts in the old houses, or under the trees, or just in the darkness — spirits who may have once fallen victim to violence. But in the photos, in the end and until now, I only see myself. I suppose I was reckoning less with the ghosts of Siem Reap, and more with the ghosts I’d brought along with me.
The full slideshow of Hounding as well as the wonderful works by Geela Garcia, Gab Mejia, and James Lontoc are now viewable on the Tarzeer Pictures website, here:
https://tarzeerpictures.com/project/angkor23
