DOMESTIC AND/OR INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT IS CURRENTLY
BEING SOUGHT FOR MY ASIAN HEART.
During the heyday of classical magazine photojournalism
in the l970’s, Cornell Capa of Magnum Photo agency coined the phrase concerned
photographer to mean “a photographer who is passionately dedicated to doing work
that will contribute to the understanding or well being of humanity.”
Despite today’s cynical and fast world turnaround of images
and headlines where traditional photojournalism has become swamped by a torrent of
lifestyle reporting and celebrity paparazzi photography, there are some who still care.
Classic photojournalism is still alive, though struggling,
amongst a new generation of photographers. Philip Blenkinsop (42) is one of them.
In l989 Blenkinsop quit his job on The Australian newspaper,
sold his Volkswagen and boarded a plane with a one way ticket for Bangkok. He was
escaping suburbia for the heartbeat and chaos of Asia. He began documenting conflict,
war, life and death in all its forms throughout Asia. Lesser known wars.
Philip trekked into the forbidden zone of Laos to photograph
the persecuted Hmong minority, suffering constant helicopter rocket attacks from the
vengeful com-munist government. Thirty years after the Vietnam War, they have not
forgiven the Hmong for siding with the Americans and the CIA. Since then Philip has been
on a race against time to alert the world to their situation. He financed his personal
crusade to Washington to use his photographs to help get word out on the Hmong
amongst Congressmen when his award winning spread in the London Times failed to
help them out. He got a sympathetic response that resulted in nothing.
“I think you do have a responsibility when you are one of the
few people there. Other journalists give me a hard time and say, ‘ Forget about it Philip.
It’s just a story. Get on with it. I find that attitude very hard to stomach,” he says.
Philip went in search of the mysterious Maoist guerillas in Nepal and found them. In l998
he smuggled himself into the jungles of East Timor and went with the Falantil guerillas for
three weeks photographing their forgotten war against the Indonesians before
independence.
But Philip is not just another war photograper seeking a quick
adrenalin fix. He regards himself as an artist and is equally at home photographing the
bizarre as he is documenting conflict and human suffering. Photographing a slaughter
house for dogs in Thailand or Saigonese youth racing themselves at adrenalin fed speed
on motorbikes without helmets through traffic crowded streets finds Philip in his element.
He doesn’t do it simply for the thrill but as he puts it himself,
“to counteract the prettified picture reporting that is presented to us everyday. My task is
simple: to show that which you cannot see somewhere else.”
For that reason the daily press often reject his work, so he has
been forced with growing critical success to exhibit in galleries and museums around the
world.
While much more at home working far away from the
respectable salons of Paris, New York or Sydney, he has rattled the photographic world
with his eye. He first presented his work at the prestigious Visa pour L’Image festival in
Perpignon, southern France in l999. He has won many international photographic prizes
for his work including Amnesty International’s award for Best Photographer of the Year in
2003. Yet he is practically unknown in Australia.
He lives with his French raised wife Agnes (also a photographer)
in Bangkok and…his pet snake. The film will follow him on assignment to China, Nepal
during the pro democracy uprisings, to Cambodia, with the Naxalites of India fighting on
behalf of Indian peasant farmers abandoned in the wake of India’s super economy growth
spurt and anywhere else the stories behind the news headlines takes him. And anywhere
else events take him in the next year.
The film will also document what drives Philip and others of his
ilk to risk life and limb struggling to have their work supported and most importantly to
have an impact, only to receive little if any response.
Despite what some would regard as a critical voice in today’s
society, “concerned photographers” pay a huge price for their art and the message they
are desperate to communicate. Is it that society has lost interest, dazzled and distracted
by celebrity and tabloid infotainment? Do we no longer value the stories that people like
Philip at great danger to themselves bring to us? Or is there a concerted effort to
suppress the work of these modern day crusaders?
The film will explore Philip’s mostly ‘hate’ rather than love
relationship to today’s electronic media and how he combats the emphasis by picture
editors in far away cities to sanitise our response to Asia, to marginalize and ignore
altogether those struggles that they deem not to have significant newsworthy value, even
though hundreds of thousands, millions of lives may be at stake.
Philip is our conscience, our voice out there on the edge mostly at his own expense
documenting and doing his best, often risking his life and living in abominable conditions
to bring us the truth about lesser known conflicts and struggles of people which would
otherwise not be seen or heard. He is in that tradition of a few legendary Australians like
Neil Davis, like Wilfred Burchett who have abandoned Australia for a life in Asia so they
can tell it like it is.
