Published on the Benham Gallery website, January 29, 2002
Phil Borges:
Ethnographic Exposures
“When I was growing up, my best memories are of the summers that I would spend on a ranch in Utah. The people there had a connection to the land – and to each other – that created a sense of cohesion, stability and connection that I found lacking in the places I came from. The subjects I shoot now share this same quality, connecting to each other and their history and ancestors through the land. I long for this connection in my own life, and I like to see and capture it in other people.”
There is a strikingly beautiful quality to a Phil Borges portrait. Whether his lens is focused on the raw street-tough bonds formed among bicycle messengers in San Francisco, the beauty of the African-American face and body, the look of weary compassion in the eyes of Tibetan refugees, or the impoverished dignity of indigenous peoples in Kenya, Ethiopia, Pakistan, or Mexico, his photographs reveal a delicate symmetry between an individual and the land that they call home.
Borges frames his subjects in the foreground of breathtaking natural backdrops, generally shot in soft focus, and through a printing process called selective toning, bathes his sharply focused subjects in a tone slightly darker than their natural skin color, at once uniting the subject with the environment and emphasizing the human being within the landscape.
In all, Borges has amassed an impressive portfolio of portraits over the course of the past fifteen years, and his work has been compiled into two beautiful books, “Tibetan Portrait: The Power of Compassion,” and “The Enduring Spirit,” a collection of photographs of tribal peoples around the world.
Though hardly a newcomer to fine art photography, Borges’ work as a photographer is in fact a second career. Growing up in the suburban cities of San Lorenzo and Orinda in the Bay Area of northern California, Borges attended UC Berkeley and UCSF, where he matriculated as a doctor of dentistry. For close to twenty years, he pursued a career as an orthodontist, until the birth of his son Dax fifteen years ago prompted him to switch gears towards an old love.
“I had taken pictures as an undergraduate, working as a field researcher in the streets of San Francisco on a needle-exchange project,” recalled Borges. “Walking the streets with a camera, interviewing people and taking their picture, I had a certain kind of access and intimacy to people’s lives that was centered around the camera. When I went to med school, I left the camera behind, but when Dax was born, I took pictures of his birth and I felt a certain tingle that I knew needed to be pursued once again.”
Taking a few photography classes at a community college, Borges immediately embarked on an ambitious project, returning to the streets of San Francisco again to chronicle the lives of the tough, marginalized subculture of San Franciso bicycle messengers. In its own uniquely urban way, this early subject matter contained many of the hallmarks that mark Borges’ entire portfolio, following a tightly-knit subculture that somehow manage to keep it together amidst a harsh backdrop – in this case the jam-packed treachery of San Francisco’s downtown streets.
“I rode with them for eight weeks, following them in traffic on my bicycle,” said Borges. “At the end of the project, I gave a slide show of my work at one of their hangouts and they threw beer cans at the screen, which made it seem like a great success. I knew I had to keep doing photography, and I knew that it was going to evolve into something more than just a hobby.”
By his own admission, Borges possesses a one-track mind, and it wasn’t long before he sold his orthodontry practice to devote himself full-time to photography. Soon after, the Borges family moved to Seattle, and though Borges pursued commercial work, it was his own projects that provided him with the greatest satisfaction, and ultimately, the success he now enjoys. Working first with Seattle street gangs, Borges moved on to shooting stylized portraits of African-American youths, exploring the printing process that has become his image signature.
“With selective toning, the picture becomes as I saw it when I was taking the picture, with the foreground subject framed by the landscape rather than lost in it,” said Borges. “Some people think it’s a gimmick. Some have told me that they think my pictures would stand on their own merits without it. But I like the way it looks, and so I’m sticking with it.”
In 1994, Borges became aware of the issues of the Tibetan people, who were invaded by the Chinese government in 1949 and who’ve endured wholesale slaughter and gross human rights violations ever since. Many have fled the country, including their leader-in-exile, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to form what has become a permanent refugee camp in Dharamsala, India. Altogether, Borges made four trips to Tibet and India over the course of a year, and was able to photograph many Tibetan refugees and gather their stories of the invasion and its aftermath. Along with beautiful portraits of both the Dalai Lama and famed Tibetan exile Palden Gyatso, Borges compiled his Tibetan pictures into his first book, “Tibetan Portrait.”
“At first, it was just intended to be a study and then a showing of work,” he said. “But when the work-in-progress show happened at the Benham, it became clear that a book was the next step.”
Following the book, Borges began to train his lens on indigenous tribal groupings in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Mexico. His work caught the attention of Amnesty International, who asked him to do a book with them to commemorate their fiftieth anniversary. That volume, “The Enduring Spirit,” earned Borges an international reputation as one of our finest contemporary photographers whose unique eye captures the spirit of fragile cultures that may well be on the verge of assimilation into the global culture of western progress.
Now, Borges has again taken on an ambitious task both of study and travel, to uncover and reveal the pan-global phenomena of shamanism. Already, Borges has trained his lens on these mystical teachers and spiritual guides in Mongolia, Pakistan, Equador, Mexico, and the Philippines, to illustrate that outside the Western world-view of progressive, individualistic materialism, there lies an animistic universe where all things are alive and that through a visionary spirituality, some of our relatives can still gain access to this ancient wisdom.
“Shamanism is a fairly ubiquitous phenomena which exists in most land-based cultures throughout the world. In every culture that I’ve visited, there’s an understanding that at a certain age, young men and women can begin to have visions, glimpses of a reality where spirits are real. In our culture, we would probably medicate such claims, but these cultures give validity to those visions, and in fact, encourage the receivers to foster the development of these gifts.”
Methods of induction into these states vary widely from culture to culture, and can range from the ingestion of psychoactive agents like peyote, mushrooms and aya huasca, though many practitioners “arrive” at their states of conscious seeing through dancing, fasting, drumming, and pain-rituals designed to bring about a transcendental state of mind. Recently, Borges traveled to the Lakota Sundance to witness a four-day ritual of dancing, drumming, fasting and ritualized pain. No photographs are permitted at this event, but Borges was simply there to see.
“Our culture focuses its attention on materialism and the cult of the individual,” said Borges. “But there’s something within the tribal grouping that provides an additional sense of consciousness that the individual may not be able to reach on their own.”
To that end, Borges has also recently created his own foundation, called Bridges, that will pair a group of US teenagers with a group of teens in countries with different world-views than our own, using the World Wide Web as the connective link for the exchange of photographs and stories between the two groups. Coincidentally, perhaps, Borges first choice of country for the Bridges project is Pakistan, which bears a rich indigenous and shamanic tradition, which could easily be lost in the shuffle as Pakistan and India are now preparing for war.
“To me, there is a natural evolution between my projects, from the Tibetans to indigenous land-peoples in general, and now with an emphasis on animistic religions that look at the earth and the sky and the stones and the animals and the humans as part of an integrated whole,” said Borges.
In the introduction to Borges second book, “The Enduring Spirit,” writer Isabel Allende points out that while tribalism may look appealing from afar, there are advances within our culture that should not be overlooked. The rights of women, for example, are greatly expanded within a culture like our own, and tribal groups by their very nature often have very strict codes of belief and behavior that may look interesting to the outside observer but which would prove constricting to a modern person. Somewhere between the two worlds of the indigenous peoples who live close to the land and in harmony with it, and the freedoms possible within Western individualism, there may lie a happy medium, and while we have yet to find it, the kinds of people and issues that Borges is exploring and exposing with his shutter, may help to lead us towards this fusion of the best of both worlds.
