A statement, impressed on the walls in squiggly handwriting, greets visitors entering the second floor of the Ateneo Art Gallery: Things you wanted to say but never did. Recalling a mournful moodboard, the phrase is the title of San Francisco-based photographer Geloy Concepcion’s exhibition at the gallery, inviting frank admission as well as curiosity—for the thoughts coursing through private life, for confessions held back, for the estranged persons we once were, and now have little to no access to.
A prolonged silence can congeal into all sorts of violences. Across a collection of photographs inscribed with public submissions responding to this invitation, Concepcion seeks to cut through the silence and dive right into the wreck of feeling and sentiment: “I forgive you for all the things you never apologized for,” reads one submission, scrawled over an image of couple, their figures effaced by the sun’s harsh glare.
Since 2019, Concepcion has collated, via social media and then a Google Forms survey, over 300,000 letters and sentiments from all over the world replying to the exhibition’s title; the form is accessible to this day. This ongoing photography project is a result of the artist’s own experience of immigrant isolation: upon migrating to the United States in 2017 with his young family, he struggled to find full-time work and adjust to the new world he found himself in. The prompt, its simple yet no-holds-barred premise, became a way for Concepcion to connect to his loved ones, friends, as well as strangers, back home.
For his homespun online project to turn into such a phenomenon–one that’s led to countless articles and interviews, a spotlight in the national news, and in 2023, a publication of a “guided journal” by HarperCollins–was not something the Pandacan-born Concepcion could ever imagine.
Seven years later, and in partnership with Ateneo Art Gallery, Concepcion presents his photographic revelations in an exhibitionary context for the very first time: a trove of portraits paired with revelations from each photographs’ subject, culled and selected from the pool of responses, that raises questions about the dynamics of documentation and confession, and the troubling spaces opened up by depicting sentiment and suffering. How can photography help us think through and go beyond the binaries of isolation and community, anonymity and specificity? What do we learn from all this ‘confessionalography’?
For Concepcion, confessionalography, which is one way to describe photography as confession, is a practice rooted in the sentimental space between distance and proximity, where the gaze—the audience’s, the photographer’s, the subject’s—tightens, unwinds, trips over itself, tempers into stiffness or reticence, doubles over, strays. It’s this gaze, a form of attending to subjectivity that Concepcion deploys narratively, which lends intimacy to these specific experiences, in which the placating language of therapy-speak sometimes softens, sometimes sharpens the extremities of each subject’s admissions and traumas.
Concepcion’s body of work, featuring subjects of all walks of life, aspires to create a public record of individual confession and sentiment, and the subjects covered in the current exhibition is a testament to this goal: undocumented migrants, friends and family, clowns, hipsters, businessmen, fathers, daughters, a beaming Judd Apatow. “It isn’t just the picture of a person,” Concepcion has said about his portraits. “It is about access; it’s the consent your subject is giving for you to represent them.”
The photographic medium surrenders to the visceral and the violent, bowing down to private experience, which in the exhibition’s case is sometimes brutalizing, often traumatic, and always anonymous. Intimacy as imagined in the world of this exhibition is built-in alongside the namelessness of these revelations. Accounts of sexual abuse, suicide, self-harm, and depression linger and reverberate as the photographs themselves—even sometimes its very subjects—melt, vanishing into the background.
In a curator’s note, Dennese Victoria recalls Concepcion, who has been a friend since they were teens, repeating the same sentence to her over the years: “Ang trabaho ko lang ay kunin yung retrato.” On the one hand, it’s a veritable and self-explanatory statement. Concepcion is a photographer, but he nonetheless also positions himself as a custodian of secrets and stories. There’s an immense responsibility ingrained in a project that invites confession, and through this exhibition, Concepcion’s photography invites engrossed discussion, and an even broader community to partake in the ongoing conversation.
Physicalizing these sentiments through the photographic form, Victoria likens it to “holding an ocean with just your hands.” The ocean is a wide open expanse, and casting a secret to those treacherous waves can be a form of surrender, even catharsis. “I’ve always thought that I will be carrying this story to the grave,” reads one of the submissions, a particularly harrowing account of sexual abuse, “so writing about this now gave me a sense of relief.” A distant relief washes over us, too, as we comb through these documents, thoughts, harbingers—as encased and glimmering as they are completely real.