Phil Borges -- Eye On The Spirit -- Seattle Photographer Bridges Cultures Through His Images Of Indigenous Peoples

On the plains of Maralal, Kenya, Seattle's Phil Borges photographed 85-year-old Iparo, whose bare torso was terraced with beaded necklaces topped by keys on a string.

How small is the world?

One of Iparo's 12 children, Peter Lenges, married a former Peace Corps worker and lives in Seattle.

In Tana Toraja, Indonesia, high in the mountains a day's walk from the nearest road, Borges met a boy who took him to his one-room house. There, to the photographer's surprise, villagers were crowded around a small television, using a generator and a satellite dish to watch the Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight, live from glittering Las Vegas.

The villagers looked back and forth between the television and this strange apparition, a Westerner toting a $40,000 miniature photo studio on his back. Finally, they burst out laughing.

As always when he travels, Borges marveled at how dominant societies have touched even the remotest spots. And, as always, his travels made him view his own culture with new perspective. In this case, the perspective was graphic: seeing the villagers' faces when Tyson bit off a chunk of Holyfield's ear.

The distance between cultures is shrinking, the boundaries blurring. Ardent adventurists are disappointed to find Gap T-shirts deep in the jungles of New Guinea, but the penetration may be inevitable.

Chilean writer Isabel Allende writes the introduction to Borges' new 80-image book, "enduring spirit" (Rizzoli $30).

In it, she tells how one of the last Amazon tribes to be exposed to outside contact readied their darts and blow guns to fight off television cameras descending by helicopter in 1996. Within a few months, they were wearing tennis shoes and selling their blow guns to tourist shops.

If there's an upside to that exposure, it is this, says Borges: With tourism accounting for 15 percent of the world's economy, governments that gave no thought to their indigenous peoples a decade ago now see value.

But cultures still are disappearing, and it is precisely Borges' ability to bridge their worlds with ours that prompted Amnesty International to ask for his help.

Borges' warm, personal images of indigenous peoples bring home the importance of protecting those cultures and defending human rights.

Amnesty International is using 50 of his photos as part of a worldwide tour - now in Los Angeles and coming to Seattle this spring - where visitors are asked to sign a recommitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Eleanor Roosevelt was chairwoman of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 1948 when the original declaration was signed, decreeing that all people are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are among the 10 million people who have recommitted to the declaration. The signatures are mostly symbolic, adding awareness more than weight.

Borges' portraits show why we should care. His view is as an outsider, but instead of portraying his subjects as exotic or romantic or pitiable, Borges's photos emphasize universal emotion. His subjects' expressions seem familiar, making them feel closer to home.

How does he do this?

One way is his ability to put subjects at ease. Though some had never seen a camera before, they relax in Borges' presence and let their personalities shine through.

Another is his presentation. He uses selective toning to emphasize the faces, bringing them forward from the dramatic but gray background. Even clothes, jewelry, tools and weapons are left in black and white so the subject's skin tone and features stand out.

These are not anonymous tribal peoples: they're individual human beings from Kenya, Ethiopia, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, Nepal, Tibet or American Indian nations. They come with names, ages and a short life history or goal.

The kindly face of Lucille Windy Boy, 71, of Rocky Boy, Mont., is profiled in front one of the high- quality tepees she stitches. Her grandchildren proudly told Borges that she and her recently deceased husband had started college five years earlier and earned their bachelor's degrees together.

On the other side of the world, 6-year-old Kinesi of Mount Nyiru, Kenya, was the only one of his parents' seven children chosen to go to school, traveling up to four miles a day. Kinesi runs most of the way, according to his mother, not out of fear of the baboons and leopards, but from the excitement of going to school.

Borges believes in the universal understanding of body language. In fact, it's his primary tool.

When he comes into a village, he meets first with the headman or chief to get permission to take photographs.

That allows him to roam, looking for someone who stands out, which he likens to being at a party and seeing one face emerge from the crowd.

He looks for strength, beauty and presence. He approaches the person alone, speaking English heavily augmented with eye contact and body language.

"Pretty soon it becomes kind of funny, and then I'll call my interpreter over and he'll explain what I'm doing in detail," said Borges, who is so lean and fit at 55 he looks like a mountain climber.

He gives a Polaroid photo to his subject, along with a small amount of money, which his subjects often immediately share.

"I love giving them out," he says of the Polaroids, though the film is the heaviest item in his backpack. "I'd feel incomplete just to take a picture and not give them anything from what happens."

Borges' skill at putting people at ease comes from his earlier life: He was an orthodontist for 18 years.

He grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood east of San Francisco, vowing to have a career that paid well but didn't require a lot of time. He quickly grew accustomed to the lifestyle and money, but not the routine.

To keep life interesting, he traveled and pursued other creative outlets. He met his life and business partner, Julee Geier, through acting.

Someone afraid of instant intimacy should not go into dentistry.

Borges was comfortable sitting inches from his patients, usually with his fingers in their mouths.

He learned to read personalities. His patients required constant motivation to wear the uncomfortable contraptions that come with braces.

But the profession was unfulfilling.

Borges had done some photography in the late 1960s, primarily documenting San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, but he didn't use his camera seriously again for decades.

In the late '80s, he followed San Francisco bicycle messengers around for months with his camera, and planned his break to become a freelance photographer.

It took him five years to give up his business. In 1989 he moved to Seattle, where he wasn't licensed to practice dentistry, removing the temptation if things didn't go well.

Five years later, after starting work as a photographer with no formal schooling and no commercial portfolio, he broke even.

As a photographer, he was drawn almost immediately to cultures outside his own.

It wouldn't have occurred to him to get involved with the black communities around San Francisco, he said, but in Seattle, living in Rainier Valley, that's who caught his eye. He did a series of portraits called "African American Beauty."

Then he dipped into another culture. He photographed gang members near West Seattle's High Point public housing development, which expanded into a photo project, "The Look Within," when Borges received grants to teach the gang members to photograph one another.

He began to draw international attention when he published "Tibetan Portrait: The Power of Compassion" in 1996. In 1997 he was named Photoperson of the Year by the photography magazine PhotoMedia. His prints start today at $1,500 for limited editions at Seattle's Benham Galleries, which was the first to carry his work nine years ago.

"It's just crazy how popular he's become," said Erin Spencer, an assistant director there.

People comment on how the faces pop out of the photos, Spencer said, and how at home Borges seems in the environment.

"You can tell he's not photographing strangers," Spencer said. "He's actually gotten to know them."

But has he? There's always the danger of the well-shod Westerner going into remote cultures and drawing conclusions he shouldn't about the "happy natives."

Borges says he believes coming in as an outsider gives him an insight somebody living there wouldn't have. It would be the same for anybody coming into our culture with fresh eyes.

He knows it's true because when he comes home from his travels, he sees aspects of our life he missed before.

One of those aspects is how isolated we are.

The indigenous peoples he visits have time for one another. They have no social services, so they support each other. Though they have few material goods, he says, they seem to have a contentment that we seek and fail to find in acquisition.

"Look at how little time I have for family and friends," Borges says. "We forget what's important.

"People say, `Don't you come back with a heavy heart from seeing all that despair?' The truth is I don't see a tremendous amount of despair."

Borges went to Tibet to show the horror of the human-rights violations, including torture, by the Chinese government, which destroyed most of Tibet's monasteries and culture.

But he was so impressed by the resilience of the displaced Tibetans that he shifted the focus of "Tibetan Portrait" to how the Tibetans used the tragedy to "deepen their own patience and tolerance and compassion."

The past century has been the most devastating for wiping out whole cultures, Borges says. Of the 6,000 languages still alive, only 3,000 are now spoken by the youngest generation, meaning cultures that depend on oral history will be lost.

Borges' photos are important, Allende writes, because if we respect what's important about the smaller cultures - which could be strong family ties, spiritual lessons, a good relationship to the Earth - it is possible we can touch without destroying.

"It is a question of moving forward with great caution and respect," writes Allende, "so that this encounter will take place on equal terms."

(The Amnesty International exhibit of photos from Phil Borges' latest book, "enduring spirit," will be at the Museum of History & Industry from May 22 to Aug. 29, 1999.)