Sunday afternoon at the mall (Guns & Roses)

© nacho hernandez

© nacho hernandez

Filipinos love malls. They are at the center of their daily life. Huge malls in Manila attract clients by the thousands, with the promise of anything they might need: cafes, restaurants, shops, churches, movie theaters, clinics, massage parlors, convention centers. Malls have also brought the "democratization" of air conditioning, with many families spending the whole day at the mall, specially on week-ends.

Yesterday, while visiting the Mall of Asia (the fourth biggest in the world), I started to bump into people dressed up as manga characters. It turns out there was a "manga convention" (probably not the right term) going on.

The guns were fake, and so were the roses.

"We don't see things as they are,

we see them as we are." - Anais Nin

or ...

"Don't shoot what it looks like, shoot what it feels like." - David Alan Harvey

Des évangéliques version catho

Courrier International

Pardon my French. That was the title of the article published last week in the French weekly magazine Courrier International, illustrated with my photos of the El Shaddai religious group in the Philippines. The photos were actually shot on assignment for The Wall Street Journal a few months ago.

Which reminds me of a golden rule for freelance photographers. My very first photography teacher was obsessed with this rule. A few years later, a photography legend with whom I took a workshop, repeated the same rule again and again, like a Buddhist mantra: "Always own your photos".

Sam and David are great teachers and with them I learned (I hope) much more than this, but this lesson by itself would have been worth it. Always keep the copyright to your photos. They are your future, your legacy as a photographer and, like in this case, you never know when you will be able to sell them again.