Never Really Left
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.
Snapshots of time spent in spaces that shaped me, often quiet and unremarkable on the surface, but rich with meaning below.
Snapshots of Time
These photographs were taken over the course of 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 people change. The context shifts. You notice the cracks, the absences, the gaps between what you remember and what now exists.
Nothing stays still
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.
the cracks, the absences, the gaps between what you remember and what now exists
What it means to leave
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.
