An Interview with Phil Borges

By Bill

Several years ago, when I first became serious about photography, I would spend much of my time perusing the Internet studying the photographs of others in the hopes of finding inspiration for my work. During one of my sessions, I ran across a photograph by Phil Borges entitled “Sukulen.” No other photograph I viewed before or since has had such an impact upon me, for there is something very unique and special about the work that inspires me.

Borges tells the following story about the photograph:

“As a young girl, Sukulen began having dizzy spells and hearing voices. She said she was very frightened and thought she was getting ill. Her grandmother assured her that she was healthy and was, in fact, very gifted. Sukulen is now a highly respected “predictor” in her tribe. Two months before I arrived, she had told several people in her village that I was coming, and had described in detail my appearance and the equipment I was using.”

His story, makes the photograph even more powerful, for it is evocative, perhaps spiritual in its message about what Borges calls the “enduring spirit” of humanity.

Years later, I had an opportunity to speak with Phil by telephone and then exchanged email messages with him. In one of those messages he wrote to me something that I shall never forget: “Stunning images are always more powerful when put into service.” And yes, indeed, if there is one photographer in the world today who has used his talent for service, it is Phil Borges. For over twenty five years Phil Borges has lived with and documented indigenous and tribal cultures around the world. Through his work, he strives to create a heightened understanding of the issues faced by people in the developing world.

Through his exhibits and award-winning books, Phil attempts to create a relationship between the audience and his photographic subjects. “I want the viewer to see these people as individuals, to know their names and a bit of their history, not just to view them as an anonymous part of some remote ethnic or tribal group.”

One can read more about his accomplishments by viewing his detailed resume at his website.

On December 14, 2007, I interviewed Phil during a telephone conversation which he graciously allowed me to record. This interview is a partial transcript of that discussion. Phil has also graciously allowed me to display several of his photographs as part of this interview. Please note that his photographs are Copyrighted © material and may not be displayed or used without his consent.

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Bill:

How do you describe yourself? As a cultural anthropologist? As a photographer?

Borges:

(Laugh. Laugh.) That’s a good question.

I would say I haven’t tried to. But I am a portrait artist, for one, and that’s my medium. I use it in a social documentary way to bring light to life issues that I deeply care about. And, it has mostly to do with people in the developing world, indigenous people in particular. So I have used the portrait to individualize people that we sometimes in the developed world think in terms of abstractions. There’s a Samburu warrior and he is a member of a family with five children, and this is what he does to keep his family healthy and fed, and this is what challenges he faces. So I am trying to individuate people we think of as abstractions and put their stories together in a way that brings light to an issue, whether it is the Tibetan issue, with the communist takeover of their country, and the occupation of their country, or it’s the gender discrimination that exists in many different parts of the world. So that’s a long-winded way of saying how I describe myself.

Bill:

Phil, how did you arrive at this as your life’s mission? Was it something that just happened to you one morning?

Borges:

No, . . . (laugh), it grew out of my love of travel. And I loved to travel to remote places, and I am especially attracted to people that live close to the land, who grow their own food and are very knowledgeable of the land in terms of their own survival; something that we in the developed world have mostly lost. We have intermediaries that deal with the land that provide for our sustenance.

I grew up on a ranch in Utah in the mountains and I lived during the summer months with people who pretty much lived off the land. And so as a kid that was a life that I just loved so my travel experience brought me to people who lived that way and these are typically indigenous people and so my work developed out of that love for travel to those places. Once I started going there, and I started photographing the people just out of the pure beauty I found there and I found in them. I think there is a beauty that comes with that type of life style. It’s a gritty textured beauty that you don’t find elsewhere and I am really attracted to it. So in the beginning I was just attracted to the beauty of these people when photographing them, and then as I got into that I started learning more and more about the challenges they faced, and I became an advocate for them in those challenges.

Bill:

What difficulties have you faced in doing your work? Because, I know you go to many very remote regions, I am sure that political upheaval was underway in some?

Borges:

Well, you know, the difficulty is just getting to these places, you know it is expensive so the logistics and the expense of getting to these places is probably the greatest difficulty I would say. In terms of political upheavals, I am not one to go to war zones, I’ve been in a few but I try to avoid them. Most of my stories are stories of or about people rising above certain situations and I am not a war photographer and I am not attracted to that so I don’t find myself in extremely dangerous situations. I have done work in Afghanistan and in Kashmir where war has been going on or there are a post-war situations but those are about the testiest places I have been.

I was in the northern part of Kenya and in that particular part of the world the tribes for ages have raided each other’s cattle and they used to do it with spears and they would come in and steal the neighboring tribes cattle. Well now, because of all the wars that gone on in sub-Saharan Africa most of these people now carry Kalashnikovs and that becomes dangerous. I was in a situation up there and there was a raid that was about to happen on a tribe and I had to run up into the mountains to escape it but that is very rare. Typically the places I go the people that I meet in theses remote areas are very wonderful, open, giving people, and I literally sometimes will leave my bag and I will have $30,000 or $40,000 worth of camera equipment. I will leave my bag in some hut somewhere and go off and take a hiking journey because I know it’s safe, I know I can trust the people there. So I don’t have a whole lot of heroine experiences to relate.

Bill:

Your organization does workshops that I think a lot of other photographers attend. Can you talk a little bit about those and what you have got planned for the next year or so?

Borges:

This is the Bridges Program I started around seven years ago to bring youth in indigenous cultures into contact with youth in the developed world and visa versa. So they could share their lives and share their stories.

You know it is one thing for me to go and take these pictures and put them together into a story or a book or an exhibit and bring them back here, it would be quite another thing for there not to be an intermediary of me of these stories going through my lens and my slant on things. I wanted them to be able to directly tell their stories so we started the Bridges Program. And we have connected communities in Africa, Asia, and South America with students here in America, in the United States. So, the problem I faced is how are we going to get training to these kids, these students, in these remote parts of the world — in a Tibetan children’s village, a village in Kenya or in Peru? How are we going to get the training to them so they can start using the new communication technologies?
 

And I decided to do it with mentors training workshops where we take and teach digital photography, digital capture, digital editing with Photoshop and teach how to put images together in a story with narration and music and we teach those workshops in these areas where we want the indigenous students to learn. And so, we typically take 15 participants on these workshops and we partner with the students in the community and we ask the students, for example, if we are in Peru, we ask the students, who are typically teenagers, 14 to 17 years old, we ask them what are the issues in your community that you feel the strongest about that you would like to see changed? What are some of the issues and challenges that you face that you want to explore or talk about? And they make a movie around that.

So, sometimes they will choose pollution in their rivers. In the developing world, a lot of people don’t have the consciousness of even putting trash in a garbage can and they just throw it in a river. And they tackle that. In South Africa the girls tackle the issue of teenage pregnancy. And so they build the story around this and everybody works together doing this and everybody learns together. It is a way to take people from America and the United States; we have people that come from Canada and Europe as well — to take people from the developed world and give them a deep cultural experience in these communities. They get a much deeper experience than if they went on a photo tour and just traveled around the country, snapping snapshots of interesting looking people. Because in these workshops we pair them with the kids, and the kids take them into their homes, they introduce them to the mayor of the community, I mean they really get to know the people of the community and get to see it in a much more intimate and real way.

Bill:

Phil, you have a unique style of photography that is instantly recognized anywhere. Recently I was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and while there I stopped by a gallery and one of your photos was there.

Borges:

Yes, Oswald’s Gallery. I don’t know if it’s called that in Wyoming, but they have a branch in Austin, Texas, and they have a gallery in Jackson Hole. I am sure that is where it was.

Bill:

What process did you go through to arrive where you are today, with a style that is so unique that it is recognized by anyone who has done photography?

Borges:

Well, when I first got involved in photography I had a great instructor by the name of Ron Zack who taught me a trick. He said: “You want to find your voice in photography, first start looking at the pictures that attract you, and tear out of magazines those pictures, and put them up on a bulletin board in your room somewhere, some place where you see them all the time, and just take those images that really move you and put them up on this board.” Well, I started doing that and I noticed they were all black and white, they were all portraits of people, I didn’t have any landscape shots up there and they all had quite dramatic lighting to them. So I started teaching myself how to do that and along with taking some classes in junior college. And I was doing black and white and I looked at it and I said “you know I would love to have just some color in this black and white just to break it up a little bit.” I didn’t like full-blown color but I wanted to take the black and white in another direction. And somebody taught me how use friskets and block out part of the print and how to tone. And so I started doing that, I started selectively toning in my prints. I really did this early on in my photographic career when I was just learning the basics and I just developed it in a way that I use it now. I have been using it that way for many years. And now I do it in Photoshop, I don’t do it chemically. But I just liked that look. It is hard to reproduce in books, that’s the problem with it. But I can control it in the darkroom and I can control it with my digital printers now and get the look I just love so it was kind of experimenting and following, looking at what I was attracted to and just pushing it a little bit further.

Bill:

What type of equipment do you use now? Do you shoot film or do you shoot digital? And what is your favorite equipment?

Borges:

Well, right now my Hasselblad I still shoot film with, not that I am so wedded to film, but digital is so wonderful it has opened up so many possibilities. I shoot my Hasselblad and I shoot tri-x film still but I am shooting more and more with my Canon Mark II 1Ds and I am just getting a Mark III 1Ds now. I am doing a lot more shooting digitally with the Canon nowadays. The one thing I miss when I shoot with my Canon is the square format because I love composing to a square. And if I have a project where I want to use a square format, and it is very portrait oriented I will use my Hasselblad. I am starting to do more and more multimedia now where I am shooting more photojournalistic and in that situation I am using my Canon.

Bill:

Is there a single image that comes to mind for you that is very special and can you tell me what it is and which one it is? And, why it is so special to you?

Borges:

Ah boy. (Laugh) You know, I’ve got a lot of images that are really special to me. You know, it’s funny, I know my images by the name of the person so it’s like I talk about them as if it is the person. You know, Jigme the little girl in the Tibetan plateau living at 17,500 feet, that had never seen a picture, or had never seen a mirror, a representation of her face, I showed her a Polaroid, that is a special one to me, I am just remembering her and her reaction to the image when she saw herself in a Polaroid.

Bill:

Phil, getting back to your overall mission, what really inspires you now, more than anything else?

Borges:

Well, there are so many things. You know I have so many stories, I want to tell them, and really the thing that well, I am always attracted to beauty as I see it, you know, the beauty in the human face and the human form especially people who live close to the land, I am still very attracted to that and I am inspired when I get to photograph it. But more and more, my work is being driven by story, by issues, and right now the issue that I have been concentrating on for the last three, four years, and I am going to continue with my multimedia pieces, is on gender equality and the importance of bringing more gender equality into the power structures of humanity, to the governments, and to the corporations and to the religions, into daily life, the family. There is a lot of very detrimental gender imbalance that still exists especially with the developing world. I am very inspired to work on that issue to tell the stories that help address it.

Bill:

Following up on that if I may, what advice would you give to a young photographer who is starting out who would like to follow the same sort of career that you have? Any specific advice?

Borges:

Well, yes, I think you have covered a lot of good topics here, you know like finding your voice in the way you do your photography, it was a big gift to me, like you say my stuff is recognized so that helps separate me and has helped me build my name. So finding your own voice in your photographic technique is important. Even more important is to find a subject that you love and explore that subject. The thing not to do is to try doing something to please a market. You want to stick close to your heart in this business and that means find those things you love. If you are a skate-boarder, put all of your energy in documenting that sport and really concentrate on one thing and get yourself recognized for doing that thing you love to cover. For me, it was traveling to and visiting these people, indigenous people, that’s what I loved, and that’s what works I think.

I am very grateful to Phil Borges for taking the time for this interview. Perhaps Phil’s greatest attribute is his genuine humility. There is perhaps no other photographer in the world today whose work has had a more profound impact upon the human condition than the work of this gracious and caring man. Please note that the Bridges Program accepts donations. Please consider making one to help this outstanding project continue. Please take the time to visit his website. Some of his most recent prints may be purchased here.