Memories of Home

I left the Philippines over ten years ago, but in many ways, I never really left. Every return feels both new and deeply familiar, a recalibration of memory and reality, of what I remember and what I now see with different eyes. This is a portrait of the Philippines as seen by someone who grew up there, but never quite felt he belonged. Shot across multiple trips home after relocating to London, this collection brings together portraits, fashion stories, and documentary moments, forming a visual journal of memory, friendship, and cultural inheritance.

These photographs were taken over a decade of visits, each marking a chapter in my evolving relationship with the place I still instinctively call home. They aren’t a comprehensive portrait of the country or even of the people I love there. They’re fragments. Glimpses. Snapshots of time spent in spaces that shaped me, often quiet and unremarkable on the surface, but rich with meaning below. The subjects are mostly friends, recurring muses, and chosen family. Their intimacy offers a counterpoint to occasional observational frames—rodeo scenes, sunlit streets, the rhythms of rural life—all rendered with softness and cinematic intensity. Natural light plays a central role, casting warmth and emotional continuity across the work.

As a queer, mixed-race Filipino artist, I’ve always occupied the space between insider and observer. These images are shaped by that duality, tracing a quiet negotiation with masculinity; one defined less by dominance and more by vulnerability, intimacy, and care. Whether shooting in the rodeo grounds of Masbate, the ancestral houses of Lipa, or golden-hour balconies in Manila Bay, I search for a version of manhood that feels tender and true.

I never set out to document anything in a formal sense. Most of these were taken in between things—before dinner, after a swim, during a walk, between laughter and silence. Some were planned. Most were not. What connects them is a desire to hold on to something ephemeral: the way light slips through a window, the posture of someone you know by heart, the atmosphere of a place you’ve returned to so often that its details become muscle memory.

There’s comfort in repetition. Familiar faces. Old routines. But there’s also a kind of ache in returning, because nothing stays still. The people change. The context shifts. You notice the cracks, the absences, the gaps between what you remember and what now exists. And still, you reach for it. Still, you try to make sense of it all through the lens.

This isn’t a story about going back. It’s about carrying something with you. A record of who I was, who I am, and the spaces in between. A personal archive, slowly and quietly built, of what it means to leave, and to keep looking back.

This project is an offering from that in-between place, a celebration of heritage as much as a reflection on what it means to belong. Both a return and a reckoning, full of love, ambiguity, and light.