Geloy Concepcion, photographer, videographer, street artist, is well known for his ongoing project, Things You Wanted To Say But Never Did.
In a recent talk at the Ateneo Art Gallery’s ArtSpeak, Finding the Familiar in the Foreign, Concepcion announces his project for 2025: to go around the archipelago and document the everyday lives of Filipinos, like a diary. He has always love talking to people, telling and sharing stories, out in the streets and on the spot.
After seven years of “rest” in the U.S., he is ready to tackle such a project, he says.
A new immigrant
In 2017, Geloy Concepcion moved to the United States to join his pregnant wife. Delays in his immigration status meant he could not work legally for three years.
Forced to stay at home, he took care of their baby daughter while his wife worked fulltime. He started taking pictures of his family, sharing them in social media, as his way to reach out. He has also been taking portraits of people, in a candid and natural style, with no artificial light, no makeup, and no fancy attire.
His art practice is a personal kind of photography. Amidst his struggles and sense of isolation in the U.S., he has rediscovered his own voice and place under the sun. In the exhibit Not Visual Noise (2019) at the Ateneo Art Gallery, he shared snapshots of daily life with his wife and daughter, a documentation of their lives through his love language, photography.
Staying at home allowed him the luxury of introspection. He asked in Instagram on November 2019 to share “things you wanted to say but never did” for many reasons: “we lack the courage to do so,” the fear of sounding crazy, it is too late, or because “we might hurt someone.”
Starting something
On the verge of taking a break from photography in early 2020, Concepcion wanted to try “one last project.” At the same time, he wanted offload his 500 unusable film photos.
An idea was born, inspired by his fascination with vandalized walls and messages in the mean streets of Manila when he was doing street art.
He remembered the question he has posted in Instagram. Erasing selected images in his old photos and superimposing them with handwritten messages, his project Things You Wanted To Say… has taken off, wildly.
A portrait by Geloy Concepcion
Catharsis
Initially, Concepcion received 30 responses that only increased week by week. He said to his wife, “I think I started something.” Today, he receives around 3,000 letters every week from all over the world; of these, three letters are messages of ending one’s life.
Some of the messages:
Will I ever make it?
I’m 38 years old. I think I’m too old to make it.
There has to be more to life than this.
I’m scared that I’m not making enough memories.
I wish you were here to witness the person I turned out to be.
The global pandemic with lockdowns, quarantines, travel restrictions, and thousands of deaths has made us all turn inward. The project has offered a safe digital place to share one’s innermost thoughts and raw emotions.
Initially. Concepcion used his old photos, pairing them with messages; then he used the photos and messages submitted to him. Later, he got some old 8,000 slides from thrift shops that he has categorized and pairs them with an appropriate message.
Beyond IG
Today, Concepcion’s project has become everybody’s project, all strangers, all anonymous. With a life of its own now, Concepcion tells his ArtSpeak audience that he does not even put his own watermarks on the photos. It is no longer his, really.
As long as those messages keep coming, he vows to continue the project to the last message. He would like it to continue in some other viable form.
I Take Pictures So I Can Remember: Concepcion’s first photobook in 2021, its 90 shots from 2011 to 2017 include the people, places, and stories he has encountered in those seven years. His second photobook, Things You Wanted to Say But Never Did was published in June 2023.
Geloy Concepcion (b. 1992, Pandacan, Manila)
An advertising graduate from the University of Santo Tomas, he started as a street artist making murals. Meeting a lot of people made him want to share their life stories, so he turned to photography as a more intimate medium.
His work Reynas delas Flores: Manila’s Golden Gays was included in the 2016 Pride Photo Award and Happy Land at the 2017 Human Rights Arts and Film Festival, a documentary about life in a Tondo dumpsite, made with two other photographers. In 2012, Concepcion was the country’s representative in the 7th Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops, Southeast Asia’s oldest established international photography event, in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
An artist-in-residence at Casa San Miguel, Zambales in 2012-2013, he is a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2021.
Today, he works on freelance assignments. One assignment from the United Nations was documenting people’s lives in Tuvalu, expected to be submerged in 25 years due to rising sea levels.