[Atmospheric music playing]
I remember very, very strongly the scent of the place.
I remember the density of it
and asking myself if it’s really a form of torture.
[Atmospheric music playing]
My name is Hannah Reyes Morales,
and I'm a documentary photographer from Manila, Philippines.
If you do drugs in my city,
I will kill you.
When Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016,
I would see dead bodies on the streets,
blocks away from the home that I grew up in.
I would see blood on the ground.
The police would take the bodies in body bags.
But once the body is picked up,
people sort of continue with their day,
and I wanted to understand how life continued amidst death.
[Tense music playing]
This was one of the first images that I made.
This evening, there was a drug-related killing
in this girl’s neighbor’s house.
I remember seeing the body
with the blood spattered through the bathroom.
And then, when the body was taken out,
she was looking through the grill, and she was wearing a crown.
I remember thinking, “What does it mean to look at all this violence?”
I guess I couldn't make sense of
a child having to witness something like that.
[Tense music playing]
When I photographed this young girl,
it was the Day of the Dead in the Philippines.
I’d been to this community for a crime scene before.
She herself is dressed in something horrifying,
but what’s actually the horror in this picture
is the landscape of her environment.
The horror is happening outside of the frame.
I look at the speckles of blood on the dress,
the face that she’s making, the veil that she’s wearing,
and I think about what it must be like
for this child to be essentially taking the elements of violence
that they were seeing in their community
and turning it into something less scary.
[Tense music playing]
[Crowd of people murmuring]
This series is taken in Manila City jail
for
Because of the drug war,
the Philippines had become
the most overcrowded incarceration system in the world.
[Tense music playing]
I remember just how incredibly crowded it was.
I remember very, very strongly the scent of the place,
the density of it.
I remember asking myself if it’s really a form of torture
being in these prisons in the Philippines.
[Tense music playing]
It was mostly pretrial detainees.
Sometimes, they wait years to be tried
for a sentence that’s meant to be just months.
The conditions inside are inhumane, fully inhumane.
[Tense music playing]
This was a moment where they were having an inspection.
They wanted to check if people had drugs or contraband or weapons.
One of the things that I always look at
when I look at this image is just everybody’s tattoos.
[Tense music playing]
Just little parts of home that they took with them.
You see here, there’s men
with their babies tattooed on their chests,
the names of their partners or their bereaved on their backs.
There was always some sort of, like, sentimental thing
that was in people’s tattoos.
[Tense music playing]
This is one of the images that has stayed with me
years and years after I’ve taken it.
The moment felt like I was seeing a painting.
Five hundred-plus men
sleeping in a cell that was made for 170, I think.
Some people are lying on cardboard boxes.
Some people are lying on mats.
Some people are lying on their shirts.
Some people have pillows. Some people have none.
A lot of them are curled up
either to themselves or with each other.
And as soon as lights go off, they have to sleep.
It was important to me
to photograph it in a way that people needed to look at it,
in a way that communicated
how impossibly unreal these conditions were.
President Rodrigo Duterte said drug users had either two options—
either jail or hell.
I have that in mind still when I look at these images
because the jail was hell in some way.
[Tense music playing]
So in 2013, I moved to Cambodia.
[Atmospheric music playing]
The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979
and in that amount of time
held one of the most violent genocides in history.
With that genocide was the erasure of a lot of Cambodian art
and Cambodian culture.
Dancers were killed. Martial artists were killed.
I had heard that there was this town
where child boxing was reemerging.
[Cambodian-style music playing]
I saw these little men, really little boys,
train in their community in this very makeshift gym.
There was this one man who felt that he had nothing to pass on.
But he knew that he could pass on martial arts,
so he started training his son.
After a while, more and more of the community’s sons
went to train with this man.
I remember just being incredibly, incredibly struck by
how much discipline goes into the training.
I was thinking, “What does this mean for a child to be a fighter?”
And realizing that, of course,
there was something much more complex going on.
[Cambodian-style music playing]
This is an image of the young boxer Von Chai Deay
surrounded by men in his community who were watching the match.
For the men in that town,
this was very, very important to them
and high stakes.
And then, when I talked to the mothers of the boys,
they were just refusing to watch the fights.
Whilst underage professional boxing is illegal in Cambodia,
in towns, you have more informal gatherings.
The town will pool together a little bit of cash for the winner,
and the winnings range somewhere between 7 to 10 USD.
In this particular fight,
they declared both of them to be the winner.
[Cambodian-style music playing]
[Waves lapping]
One of the stories that I wanted to do
for a long time about the Philippines
was the story of the relationship between
a community of fishermen and these gentle giants,
these whale sharks.
[Atmospheric music playing]
At dawn, the fishermen literally
hand-feed the whale sharks in the water.
Many of them feel like these whale sharks are like their family.
This particular community had essentially created
a whole industry on whale shark tourism.
There was a lot to manage.
I was having to swim.
I was having to avoid the whale sharks.
Maybe two minutes after this image,
my underwater case started leaking inside my camera.
And so I was very, very glad that I got the frame.
It's a controversial story.
Conservationists and advocacy groups
insist that you mustn’t alter the behaviors.
Coastal communities who have
real economic concerns about feeding their families,
what does it mean when your way of doing that
is dependent on a species that’s endangered?
That was really a tough one for me.
[Atmospheric music playing]
[Tense music playing]
I’m hoping somehow the stories that I do
help other people understand lives that they don’t share,
understand issues that perhaps needed a face.
[Melancholic music playing]
How we look at these things matters.
How we portray people matters.