The Hague, The Netherlands. It's a vague point where I realize that somewhere between points A and B, something out there had gone terribly wrong.
THIS IS NOT MANILA, conceptualized while watching the fireworks on the first of January 2011, is a personal project that aims to informally document my own or shared experiences as a political refugee, a photographer and a musician and their relation to a larger scheme of things.
I bought my first camera (a second-hand Nikon D40) in 2007 after deciding it was more important than bicycles. Yes, even in the Netherlands.
That was about 17 years after I was born in Manila, 7 years after I found photojournalism interesting, one year after I arrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee and a few months after Mae Astrid Tobias (1979-2009), a writer of children's books allowed me to shoot my first photographs using a film SLR.
Four years later, I found myself in The Hague halfway through a stalled documentary photography course and still trying to figure out what we are doing here.
