Guerrilla in East Timor and violence between muslims and christians in Indonesia
Philip Blenkinsop
Agence VU
Today aged 34, Philip Blenkinsop, of Anglo-Australian descent, went to live in Bangkok in 1989. Using the Thai capital as his base, he has travelled over all of Southeast Asia, covering lifestyle issues as well as the region’s hot spots. From the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in 1989 to Hun Sen’s coup d’état in Phnom Penh in 1997, from Cambodian landmine victims to the “treatment” of drug addicts in Thailand, dog abattoirs and city nights, Philip Blenkinsop has documented, with very direct black-and-white photographs both brutal and sophisticated, a world that fascinates him, but at the same time whose extreme violence frightens him.
Preview
Last year, he worked on an extraordinary project on the East Timorese guerrilla, and has just finished shooting a reportage on the indescribably violent clashes between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia. By combining the direct style of war reporting with magnificent view-camera portraits of combatants or groups, his is a drastically new way of telling about violence in the news, which goes beyond the mere description of trivial details and bare facts. Not content with just supplying raw information, Blenkinsop questions us about the constancy of barbarity, through which we appear as brutal humans who have not drawn the lessons of history and its conflicts, humans who still live in the age of tribal wars and primitive violence.
Philip Blenkinsop has published a book, The Cars That Ate Bangkok, the layout of which he worked on himself, in a very rigorous and original fashion. It is a portrait of the city through its car accidents and urban violence (White Lotus Publishers). He joined Vu in 1997.
