Pictures of a Disappearing World

Phil Borges travels far from his home on Mercer Island to document with compassion the faces of a diverse and enduring, yet increasingly endangered, population.

Photograph by Charles Peterson for City Arts

For someone who speaks no other language than English, Phil Borges is a formidable translator. His photographic portraits of indigenous people around the world disclose the not-so-obvious connective thread between wearers of grass skirts and girdles, penis gourds and pinstriped suits. The concise captions that Borges includes underneath each image of his otherwise foreign (in two senses of the word: from another country and unfamiliar) sitters allow viewers a glimpse into the lives of those they’ll likely never meet. It’s the art of communication and Borges, equipped with only a camera, has mastered it.

Borges approaches his subjects alone. “In English, the only language I know, I tell them I like them and I’m fascinated,” he explains. “They may not understand a word I’m saying, but they can read my body.” Only afterwards does he call over an interpreter to spell out the details of his project. “I always break the ice on my own.”

Chandi, 17, Tangil, Bangladesh: Chandi entered the sex trade because of a relative. Four years after her mother died, Chandi was tricked into joining a brothel by a stepmother who promised she would have a job cleaning houses. It is estimated that 98 percent of women who join brothels in Bangladesh do so against their will.

Technically Borges has his foot in two worlds as well, using a mixture of digital photography and traditional film and darkroom processes to produce large-format, subtly tinted portraits. Photographed at close range, on first look his subjects appear remote as they gaze back at the camera with expressions ranging from curiosity and amusement to doubt, pride and chagrin.

Borges strives to bring the lives of indigenous and tribal people into sharp focus. His work has earned him recognition from a wide range of  luminaries, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, author Isabel Allende and the Dalai Lama; all three have contributed written texts to Borges’s books.

His portraits shot in Tibet, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Ghana and Ecuador, to name but a handful of locales, are labeled with ordinary statistics such as the subject’s age and name and where he or she resides. Also succinctly documented are the subjects’ personal interests or belief systems, how they spend their days and their thoughts on the future of their tribe or community. This “day in the life” commentary gives human dimension to what could otherwise appear as remote stereotypes. If within his portraits he captures obvious “us and them” differences such as dress and environment, he also brings to light the ties that bind.

Adjoa, 28, Bouko Village, Ghana: Adjoa is the youngest of four wives and spends most of her time in the field tending the grain and corn crops. The other wives share the household chores, but Adjoa prefers working communally on the farm with the other women in the village, instead of spending time alone in the kitchen over a hot smoky fire. Last year, CARE helped Adjoa form a thirty-member women’s savings and credit association. Having access to loans allowed the women to afford preventive health care items for their children, such as mosquito nets and medicine, that their husbands were hesitant to purchase. During their group meetings, the women also discussed family planning and women’s rights. They discovered that they had a more powerful voice collectively than as individuals. Gradually, they became less shy about speaking out at community meetings, and now the women contribute substantially to the previously all-male village civic meetings. As word of the success of the Bowku women’s group has spread, the women are being asked to help form women’s associations in neighboring villages as well.

Borges describes his initial reaction upon entering some of the more isolated locales where he’s shot as nothing short of culture shock, “as if I’ve stumbled upon a Hollywood set.” It doesn’t take long, however, before he sees the familiar in the foreign. “Something in the people’s gestures or features reminds you of someone from home.”

What does he look for in selecting his subjects? “The zinger. The thing that makes me go ‘Whoa. Wow. Really?!’”

As a kid, Phil Borges would venture from the suburbs of San Francisco to the underbelly of downtown Oakland. He conducted “deals” for the purchase of firecrackers in the backrooms of Chinese shop owners. He was nine years old. So it comes as little surprise that Borges has no problem traveling halfway around the world in search of his subjects. “I’ve always been comfortable going into strange places,” confirms Borges.

Nafisa, 7, Kabul, Afghanistan: Nafisa was thrilled when she learned she was chosen to attend Salman-e-Fars, a new school recently opened for young girls in Kabul. Girls now make up 34 percent of the student population in Afghanistan — a dramatic increase since the Taliban rule, when it was essentially zero.

Borges believes that indigenous people have much to teach developed nations. “I love going into these cultures where they are still doing what they’ve been doing for centuries. They’re PhDs of the empirical knowledge of their part of the world. They know that when a crab comes out of the ground and flips sand to the west that a storm is coming from the east. Our scientists don’t know this stuff.”

Borges’s first foray into portrait photography occurred when he was studying orthodontics at the University of California Medical Center in the sixties. A work-study job had him interviewing drug users who shared needles. Borges gravitated towards “the freakiest subjects” he could find. Soon he was supplementing his interviews with visuals. He got a student loan to buy a Minolta SRT101, his first serious camera, and began documenting the post–Summer of Love drug and music culture of the Haight Ashbury.

But for Borges, raised by a single mother without a lot of resources, a conventional career with a steady income was a powerful draw. He opened an orthodontic practice in Southern California that thrived. It felt routine, though, and Borges grew restless. After eighteen years of practice, Borges picked up his camera to record his son’s birth. Within two years he had pulled up stakes, sold his practice and moved to the Northwest to pursue a career in photography. “I needed to burn the bridge,” explains Borges. “I didn’t want to be tempted to go back into practice if things got scary.” When I ask if they did get scary, Borges deadpans, “Very. Very. Very.”

Abay, 28, Awash Fontale, Ethiopia: Abay was born into a culture in which girls are circumcised before age twelve. When it came time for her circumcision ceremony, Abay said, “No.” Her mother insisted: An uncircumcised woman would be ostracized and could never marry, Abay was told. When her mother’s demands became unbearable, she ran away to live with a sympathetic godfather. Eight years later, Abay returned to her village and began work as a station agent for CARE, supervising the opening of a primary school and a health clinic and the construction of a well. After five years, she finally convinced one of the women to let her film a circumcision ceremony. She showed the film to the male leaders. They had never seen a female circumcision and were horrified. Two weeks later, the male leaders called a special meeting and voted fifteen to two to end female circumcision in their village.

“But,” he says, “I’ve always loved the unknown.” It’s a trait that has allowed him to feel at home in some of the most remote places on earth.

Widespread recognition began with Tibetan Portrait, published in 1996, a series of photographs that document the citizens of a nation in peril. Borges sent a mockup of his book to ten publishers. He’d received nine rejections when Rizzoli expressed interest. “Their editor loved it,” said Borges. “She had just taken a Zen Buddhist meditation class and was hooked.” Publication of the book ensued and gallery interest in Los Angeles followed. When red-carpet regulars such as Madonna and Jamie Lee Curtis started purchasing his work his career took flight.

In his most recently published series of portraits, Women Empowered (Rizzoli, 2007), Borges documents women from around the world up against — and overcoming — overwhelming obstacles. Take the example of Abay from Awash Fontale, Ethiopia, where for years girls have been circumcised before the age of twelve. On the eve of her surgery, Abay ran away.

She returned to her community eight years later and has been actively lobbying to end the practice of female circumcision ever since. In Borges’s diptych portrait, she embodies the confluence of past and present. Her hair covered by a scarf, Abay stares frankly at the viewer, her left hand, which sports a digital wristwatch, placed squarely on her hip while her right hand, hooked nonchalantly over a wooden stile, is nuzzled by a young camel.

Howa, 8, Awash Fontale, Ethiopia: Howa’s mother was one of the first women in Awash Fontale to be convinced that female circumcision was a “bad practice.” Thanks to Abay’s efforts, Howa will be the first girl in her entire family history not to be circumcised.

In early 2001 Borges established Bridges to Understanding, a nonprofit organization that uses modern means such as live video conferencing and digital storytelling to allow youths from disparate cultures to meet face-to-face. The program creates interactive experiences between students in the U.S. and those in Canada, Peru, India, Guatemala, South Africa and the West Bank of the Jordan River. It was designed to give indigenous people a voice and to foster understanding in the United States by making events happening internationally relevant locally. “Kids that have seen oil spills firsthand,” Borges explains, “can say, ‘look how this is affecting us.’”

Borges’s desire to raise cultural awareness has been partially prompted by the widespread threat of linguistic extinction. “Of the six thousand languages currently spoken on earth,” he explains, “three thousand are no longer spoken by the children. In one generation our cultural diversity will be cut in half.” Why is this alarming? “Cultures house knowledge. Our resiliency as a species, our creativity, our strength, is dependent on our diversity. As it goes away we become more vulnerable in all those areas.”

Borges is currently working on a multimedia production that combines his ethnographic portraits with documentary-style video. “I like to bring global issues to the fore by using the stories of individuals,” he says. Postcards from Heaven revolves around Chandini Perera, a plastic surgeon in Sri Lanka, and explores the phenomenon of self-immolation — a problem as common to young women in India as anorexia is in the United States. Even when victims survive, Perera told Borges, these young women are often, because of superstitious beliefs regarding contagion, publicly shunned.

Kumari, one of Perera’s patients, was four months pregnant when she set herself on fire. Although she went on to have a healthy baby, her presence in the maternity ward evoked ostracism from other women who feared for their own children’s safety. Self-immolation may not resonate as a particularly relevant topic to most Americans. Borges, however, reveals within it a grain of universality.

Borges is a prolific photographer. Does he have any regrets? “Oh yeah,” Borges replies. “That I didn’t jump in earlier on. Your art evolves as you go along. But more importantly, the places I go are disappearing. The people I photograph are disappearing.” He has made up for lost time by fostering international engagement between young people, advocating for those in developing worlds and giving a human face to their concerns. Not least of all, his project is to substantially broaden U.S. awareness of other cultures. To draw attention to the “zingers,” the human experiences beyond our own that make us go ‘Whoa. Wow. Really?!’” •