That Kid from Manila: Hannah Reyes Morales, Pulitzer Finalist
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Celebrating Pulitzer week with journalist Aurora Almendral, 2024 (Photo courtesy of Hannah Reyes Morales)
When she finally heard the news, she thought it demanded formality, the dignity of a measured response. She was eight months pregnant, and the pregnancy made her physically heavy. It was a fact that—like her vocation, photography—kept her tethered to the earth.
But now she wanted to defy gravity. She wanted to jump in the air, leave the ground and return to it.
By 4 a.m. she was out the door, and then on a flight to New York City, finally rising into the atmosphere. She was on her way to the office of the New York Times, to participate as an honoree of Pulitzer Day.
She never had the conceit of imagination, she thought, to ever dream of that possibility. But now the honor would forever be attached to her name: Hannah Reyes Morales, Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Feature Photography. https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/photography-staff-associated-press-1
AS A CHILD She remembered: she wrote that she someday wanted to be in New York City. That was when she was growing up in Malate, Manila in the 1990s, and she lived most of her life indoors. Her mother worried about the dangers of the world outside. The boy neighbors were too rough.
She watched out the window as the other kids, the freer kids, biked up and down the street. She wanted to bike too. Instead she lived in her own internal world. When she could be outside, she petted the roots of trees; those were her friends.
Confined inside, she asked questions of the household help, interviewing them for gossip. At home, she learned the hierarchies of classism in Philippine society. The woman who raised her, who would later walk her down the aisle, the woman she called Nanay, was a cook. Family affection and employment juxtaposed in ways that confused her.
She quizzed the older cousins who would come in and out of the house, gathering bits and pieces of family history.
SHE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY But from an early age, she thought in stills. It was always photography that made her stop and feel. The first photos she studied: the images in old, wrinkled National Geographic issues, a magazine she did not yet know she would one day photograph for. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/storytelling-through-photography-hannah-reyes-morales/
And she studied old family albums. Her grandmother, glamorous in a perm, holding her own mother as a baby. A black-and-white photo of two maids standing behind children on swings. The only photo of her father: a young man with a moustache, wearing a striped shirt, holding a karaoke microphone.
The early training for photojournalism was there, in Manila; the close, careful repetition of looking. Learning to ask thorough questions for thorough answers.
Later, in her famous photographs, the themes would still be present: room interiors. Home spaces. https://www.mapsimages.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/HRMorales00010.jpg
The domestic life of women and children and family. https://www.mapsimages.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/HRMLILU-18.jpg
Photos should be as carefully dignified, she thought, as what families held in treasured photo albums. https://www.mapsimages.com/photographers/hannah-reyes-morales/
MAKING THE DREAM TANGIBLE. A cousin from Denmark brought a DSLR camera into the house in Manila when she was fourteen. She thought, then, that being a photographer was a passing fancy, one that would never materialize. But the palpable weight of the camera stayed with her. Feeling the click. Being able to touch the lens. Carrying the DSLR’s heft.
She never had the conceit of imagination, she thought, to ever dream of that possibility. But now the honor would forever be attached to her name: Hannah Reyes Morales, Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Feature Photography.
So she sold used clothes to support herself as an undergraduate at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She traveled to and from Anonas, Cubao, and Malate, neighborhoods crowded with old clothes from other countries. She boarded jeepneys and trains with huge plastic bags of musty garments. Unable to afford cabs or a private car, she memorized Metro Manila through its public transportation. She brought the clothes home, laundered them, photographed them, and sold them online.
On assignment in the Arctic while six months pregnant, 2024. (Photo courtesy of Hannah Reyes Morales)
She still didn’t have her own camera, so she borrowed one to work events photography at Tiendesitas, an open-air mall with live music and food stalls. She learned principles of humility there. How to be present, but not intrusive. To use cues. The photographer, she gathered, is always at the mercy of others saying yes and allowing her into their world. Permission is never guaranteed. You are never entitled to anyone’s picture. Any image you ask consent for is just an act of grace from someone who’s in front of you.
Eventually she earned the honors, https://ideasimagination.columbia.edu/fellows/hannah-reyes-morales/#:~:text=She%20is%20the%20recipient%20of,Documentary%20Practice%20and%20Visual%20Journalism the professional assignments, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/explorer-profile-hannah-reyes-morales/ the ability to support herself full time with photography.
SHE STILL HAD HER DOUBTS. Even after she had earned her own camera and equipment and traveled the world as a freelancer, she could feel the limitations of her beginnings in a country with little investment in arts education. Her earliest reference points were the early Internet, not galleries. I don’t think I have a natural gift. I have to work at my craft to close the gap.
When the New York Times sent her on the multiple-country assignment on the continent of Africa https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/28/world/africa/africa-youth-population.html , the question remained—As a photographer you’re always asking, Am I the right person for this story? It was five weeks of immersion in five countries, an exuberant and complex portrait of the joys and deep challenges of African youth.
As she photographed, the peoples of each country were excited she was another individual of the Global South. They had expected that the New York Times would send an American person. Instead, they wondered at the Filipina girl before them, holding the DSLR and asking permission for their images.
SHOOTING THE STORY. In Lagos, Nigeria, she felt echoes of home. It was often difficult to imagine a future for her home city, Manila, as a developed, world-class city. But Lagos was reflective of Manila; its postcolonial arts scene gave her hope for what Manila could one day be, with the right investment. The glimmers of meaning-making, where things are going; we’re not going to get those answers from the West.
There was an energy to the developing world, most powerful when raised in grassroots ways. The young people she met asked similar questions communities in the Philippines ask: How do you document immense challenges, like climate change and migration? How do you balance the positivity of youthful energy with the anguish of what may block it? The youth of the Global South are different. Their lived experience is rich; there’s a lot of idealism, negativity, lived experiences, and wisdom.
For many conversations, the youth spoke to her of their dreams.
In Marrakesh, Morocco, the people dreamed of water.
AND THEN THERE WAS The protest in Kenya. The one she isn’t sure is worth mentioning.
The mob. The men who dragged her to where, she couldn’t see—she had been teargassed. The hair pulling. The shock of the sudden violence. She had faced threats before, but nothing like the physicality of this mortal danger.
Thankfully a male photographer from the community entered the mob, put her in a body hold, grabbed her away from the men, and placed her in the back of a vehicle.
Thankfully, kind individuals from the community found her stolen equipment in a market and returned it to her.
THE TRUE CHALLENGE https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/28/world/africa/africa-youth-population.html How to photograph an energy? The explosive and hopeful potential of youth?
To her, there was no energy like birth. The ceremonies of naming. The rituals around delivery. Births are transformative and bring me to a place where I’m confronted with past and future.
THE DOUBTS REMAIN WITH HER Even now. There are ways in which my work will never be enough. She will always see the gaps, how the art could be better. She can never predict what will resonate with an audience, what image will garner praise or impact. But she knows, and respects, the labor she put into this story, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/28/world/africa/africa-youth-population.html the level and intensity of self she invested in the work the Pulitzer Prize committee recognized.
In the future she wants to keep working at longer looks. She wants to imbue each image with the dignity and well-kept precision of the photo albums that inspired her questions, and kept her gaze, long ago as a child.
AFTER THE NEWSROOM CEREMONY They announced her name, https://www.nytco.com/press/2024-pulitzer-prize-remarks/#:~:text=Hannah%20Dreier%20has%20won%20the,factories%2C%20slaughterhouses%20and%20construction%20sites and she felt her disparate selves at work. Here the leaders of the New York Times were, saying she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And yet in her head she was still that kid from Manila.
But she is in New York City now, at 33, long removed from her confinement at home in Malate. Dazed with her new reality, she enters a pizza parlor. There are firemen there. She orders two slices. She allows herself a little delight. It is the best pizza.
She is eight months pregnant. In a few weeks, she will give birth, and she will name her daughter Amihan Ilaya. In a Philippine creation myth, Amihan is the first creature to inhabit the universe: a bird alongside the gods. Ilaya means to set free, or upriver.
At home in 2024.(Photo courtesy of Hannah Reyes Morales)
Welcoming Amihan Ilaya, 2024. (Photo courtesy of Hannah Reyes Morales)
Here, in the city she dreamed of as a child, she feels the forces of the past, present, and future at work within her. Here, in this moment of her singular life, Hannah Reyes Morales wonders. You’re never fully formed. As a human being you’re always evolving and changing. There are so many ways of defining what a life looks like.
Laurel Flores Fantauzzo is the author of the novel MY HEART UNDERWATER and the nonfiction book THE FIRST IMPULSE. She is at work on a third book for Harper / Quill Tree Books.
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