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In Conversation With Conflict Zone & Environmental Photojournalist Philip Blenkinsop

Rhea Almeida

“Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”

Having travelled across Asia photographing conflict zones from Thailand’s southern insurgencies to Maoists in Nepal, Hmong injustices in Laos and more, veteran photographer Philip Blenkinsop’s refined lens has captured destruction, discrimination, displacement and human rights violations across different parts of the continent. Driven by an intrinsic love for the art, and fueled by the need to tell untold and scarcely covered stories, his work transcends to a place where he stands as just an unbiased story-teller with a camera in hand. Shifting his focus to environmental issues primarily in China, Blenkinsop’s purview has expanded as he highlights a range of pertinent issues, and with that shift comes a whole new set of challenges. As we catch up with the acclaimed and skilled photographer, he gives us an insight into his life, his journey, and the world he sees through his lens.

It all started with a box of memories

“In Perth 2012, a year before the death of my Father I decided to delve into the boxes of Kodachrome ‘holiday’ slides, dating from the early 1960’s, that lie stacked in a cabinet in our family house, with a view to assembling a small book of ‘new’ memories for my parents as a Christmas gift,” shares Blenkinsop. Each slide he found was shot on a 1959 35mm Halina Rangefinder camera, “a thing of beauty”, he calls it. Describing a childhood memory like it was out of an old novel, he recalls his parents choosing the ‘best’ slides from those precious holidays that would arrive from Kodak, mounting them on an elongated holder and projecting them one by one on a screen with a careful flick of the wrist. “The raising of the canvas screen alone had an air of ceremony to it, imbued as it was with the promise of latent memories The images that danced on that screen will be forever with me. I know each of them intimately,” he shares.

Exploring those boxes of nostalgia uncovered delightful memories previously unknown, “My Mother and I, underexposed playing in a darkened shadow of the garden, me sticking out the top of an apple tree and among others, one rather risqué landscape of my Mother, standing naked and posing coquettishly on polished rocks mid stream.” As his love for photography grew, from finding a box brownie at a jumble sale when he was about eight or nine, to studying photography under Ashley Bonser, a generous and patient man who he is still in touch with four decades later, Blenkinsop believes that the drive for him came from within, since he had no major outside influences or encounters with artistic individuals. “Life’s patina was rich but my visual inspiration in the strict photographic sense came via my self-motivated discoveries of the great contemporary exponents of my youth, and here I speak of the likes of Frank, Cartier-Bresson, Koudelka, Arbus and Peress, whose book, Telex Iran, was of the likes I had never seen before,” he explains.

Home.134 Seafield Road.

Challenges along the warzone way

“The key to documenting in a compelling (successful if you like), way is to be imbued with genuine humanity. Without it everything else is superfluous,” he tells us. From guerrilla activities in the mountains of East Timor and cannabalism in Borneo, to injustices doled out to Hmongs at the hands of the government in Laos, Blenkinsop’s worked in conflict zones for years, believing that his responsibility as a journalist was to the individual, his plight or his journey. “I wanted to create an honest, albeit subjective, interpretation of that person in as much as the image could become part of the collective memory of a struggle, as opposed to being a more self-serving interpretation based more on my feelings, trepidation or imaginings-cum-opinions,” he shares.

A whole range of unimaginable challenges come with working in a conflict zone, from more personal ones like staying warm and carrying weight, to more severe ones, like Blenkinsop’s unfortunate incident with a burrowing parasite in Mindanao called ‘Tungao’ or dealing with various communities. He maintains that his greatest challenge in a conflict zone has been getting out without endangering the people he was engaging with. “It might require a selfless act, less of grandeur than of simple consideration but it is something that I have tried to do, whenever possible.” Luckily, most of the communities he photographed were accepting, inviting even, and he only ever faced a problem once, “The only place I have ever had difficulties shooting were with the Nepali Maoists because there was a real and imposed hierarchy within the group. Commanders would want to dictate the when and where before you pressed a button. Consequently the opportunities to shoot had to be seized with equal pinches of diplomacy, guile and not a small degree of stubbornness.”

Photographed by Philip Blenkinsop

A photographer’s role is to be a witness and a messenger

“One’s integrity and humanity should be enough to prevent the exploitation of one’s subjects. Unsurprisingly, where these traits are lacking in photographers, this is not the case,” Blenkinsop states, believing that a photographer is meant to remain a witness and messenger solely. “More depressing still is that there does not exist the collective will in the industry to excommunicate people who have been found to stage images or exploit their subjects. The hypocrisy distresses me,” he confides.

As we asked the passionate photojournalist about getting people interested in the pertinent issues he was covering, and how frustrating it must be sometimes when these conflicts don’t get the attention they deserve, he said, “Of course, this is the great struggle with anything that you care about. We all want people to see life the way ‘we’ see it. Getting people to empathize and engage. It is a constant struggle and it is always an issue. One simply has to do the best one possibly can.”

Eventually, the conflict-zone photographer shifted focus towards environmental issues, which was more or less a natural progression as he matured. The glaring environmental problem of water took him to China in 2008 to work in the Yellow River environs. “It was a whole different way of shooting, focusing more on capturing the feeling that permeates a place rather than, in many cases, the players within it. I had a different set of responsibilities in a completely different theatre. I was no longer focused on an individual or a localized group,” he tells us.

“Each life-experience I have ever had influences how I interpret the world.”

Since he ventured into Asian countries in 1989, Blenkinsop has experienced this part of the world through various lenses that challenged his first-world sensibilities, as he puts it, “Over the interim years, my experiences in ‘Asia’ have in turn shaped the way I view the ‘West’,” while he’s careful to add, “But let us not forget though, that there is no such place as ‘Asia’, or such person as an ‘Asian’. My twenty-six years in the region might just make me uniquely equipped to comment through the camera, with a vision which, while hopefully respectful, is nevertheless far removed from someone who has lived their whole life in one Asian region.”

A curious anecdote from the photographer’s time in Mumbai in 1989 surfaces, painting a unique picture about one of his first encounters with India. The story is set in the city’s Taj Mahal hotel. “Turbaned doormen at the hotel kept throwing me out though, because they thought I was sneaking into the lobby to steal the cool air. They refused to believe that I was a paying guest. My sandals, cut from a car-tyre by a double-amputee, former Khmer Rouge guerrilla were, I suspect, not an insignificant part of the problem,” he relates. As he explored the city, he found himself at the dirt floor of a five-way intersection, with hardly a soul about at first. Then, in real-time before his eyes, a sea of trucks, taxis, buses and more barrelled through, which Blenkinsop describes as, “Like when the bath water (if you are in a first world country) whirl-pools the plethora of children’s toys into that bottle-neck-cum-plug-hole in the plastic (porcelain if you are in the third/developing world).” As he watched at the scene unfold, incredulous, his sense of claustrophobia and suffocation kicked it, making him rush back to the Taj. “It was my first ‘Asian’ crowd experience and I failed dismally,” he sighs.

Since several Western photographers are often accused by locals in third world nations of being ‘colonial off-springs’ who try to show the world what a community’s home is like, and end up displaying crass stereotypes, Blenkinsop addresses this issue, “I have been accused, in the loveliest of Bangla ways I grant you, by one photographer of making tourist photographs of Dhaka, photographs from the select geographical locale of Old Dhaka which for me is one of the most incredible places I have ever been. Is it balanced in its portrayal of life in Dhaka you might ask? ‘No’. Do the images depict a sea of humanity and display the full gamut of human emotions? ‘I believe they begin to’.”

Photographed by Philip Blenkinsop

“It is the eye and the heart that chooses both the subject and the way in which it is interpreted.”

“The canvas is blank and each and every observation has a potential place within our narrative. How we weave moments together and the importance we give to select images determines the nuance of our narrative,” believes Blenkinsop about the power wielded by photography as a tool of expression. Hosting a street photography workshop at the Chennai Photo Biennale this month, he plans on helping young photographers refine the way in which they approach their surroundings, “What most concerns me during the week-long process is working with participants to arrive at a developing a greater visual understanding and awareness of their environment. To set free the intuition to interpret that environment in the most effective manner.” Understanding the image, its layers and all the possible nuances it harbours is an important step towards creating a photographer where the soul or emotion of a moment becomes tangible for the viewer, he explains.

Street photography opens up a whole new world to the eye of the lens, and highlighting the quiet in the chaos, the moment or emotion that one wishes to capture is truly an art. “The most important thing to keep in mind when photographing is to keep your mind open and have no route ‘wrote’ in stone. Embrace chance and take the time to look and your journey will be unique,” Blenkinsop signs off.

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