New Zealand-based creative Maria Ligaya Bumanglag offers a photography practice shaped by attentive listening to quiet cultural moments and experiences encountered as a travel photographer. Bumanglag’s photography cultivates skills that extend beyond the lens, relying on compassionate and curious listening that allows for her evocative documentation across cultures and places.
Travel Photography as Listening: “The Language of Elsewhere”
As a travel photographer, Bumanglag gathers stories while moving through places where the only common language is sentiment. Landscapes, architecture, roads, and spoken language remain foreign from place to place, but the art of listening amidst the unfamiliar makes Bumanglag’s storytelling possible.
In the moments preserved by Bumanglag’s lens, she practices a photographic approach built around empathy and open-mindedness. A mix of memory and nostalgia wash over many of her photographs with hints of sepia veiling over her subjects. Bumanglag adjusts her composition and creative direction in response to what stands before her, listening intently to emotional context and the visual language of a given moment to capture its narrative.
The Poetics of Movement: Photographing Transit, Motion Blur, and Street Life
Taken across South Asia, Bumanglag’s body of work “Between Departures” captures moments in transit, showcasing places that were never still. The series adopts an intimate point of view and seats the viewer directly inside the autorickshaws.
As records of time, these photographs catch autorickshaws in passing; some racing against time and exposure, others stalled long enough to recognize faces and glimpses of the surrounding village. Sunlight and heat immerse these photographs. Echoing the experience of tuk-tuks flashing by, Bumanglag’s documentation of swift motion and light evokes the warm breeze blowing through the open rickshaws.
This combination of Bumanglag’s personal perspective and deliberately blurred motion accentuates the candid nature of her transit-based work. As an analogy for the momentum of life, Bumanglag’s “Between Departures” reveals the beauty in practicing mindful curiosity along the path towards a given destination.
By seeking her surroundings with mindfulness—a road, a face, a village, and the overlooked—all begin to tell their own stories. Bumanglag seeks these stories, whether clearly depicted or in a motion blur, and shares glimpses of street life, colors, and ways of living across regions, each with rich cultural narratives.
Bumanglag’s work conveys the experience of looking at landscapes and communities with honest eyes. Her photography is primarily candid and tailored to individual moments in transit, connections, and conversations. Surrendering to the spontaneity of light and intrigue, Bumanglag’s curiosity-driven photography turns fleeting moments into an honoured subject. This technique brings a certain urgency to her photography, where an attentive gaze can turn any passing moment into a still frame alive with cultural memory.
Windows as Frames: An Intimate Perspective on Scenic Views
In her “Windows of Quiet Stories” series, Bumanglag brings a candid quality to landscape photography by capturing views through various windows and architectural openings across countries. Bumanglag incorporates her intimate perspective filtered through windows of varying shapes and designs, each silhouette reflecting its respective region.
Typically blurred, the patterns of different lace curtains, arched windows, and casements function as abstracted and domestic frames for the vast scenery found on the other side of the wall, but they also give structure to narratives. By including window frames and curtains as context in her composition, this series encapsulates the opposing experiences of being within but also apart from the landscapes. The series becomes a transitory state in and of itself.
Often looking out at villages, mountains, or architecture, these scenic photographs draw the viewer into the experience of coexisting with monumental and enduring landscapes across the world. Bumanglag’s photographs become acts of appreciation, grounded in being an attentive, present witness to the world(s) around us—not only being aware of our direct surroundings, but of the innumerable stories found within them.
Photography as Coexistence; A Practice of Presence and Honest Storytelling
At the heart of Bumanglag’s work is the urge to listen closely to the landscapes, faces, and cultures around her as a way of coexisting with the ongoing stories woven through time and space. Her photography takes seemingly ordinary moments and preserves their truth with an ethic of honest storytelling while practicing the art of attention and bearing witness to a mosaic of cultural narratives.
In Bumanglag’s approach, photography becomes more than documentation; it is a way of inhabiting the world with care. To look, in her practice, is not to possess but to pause; to receive and to remain open to what a place might quietly offer.
Her images remind us that travel is not only measured by distance crossed, but by the depth of attention we are willing to bring to what passes before us. Bumanglag’s work leaves behind not only traces of where she has been, but a poetic model for how to be present within the unfamiliar: gently, curiously, and with the humility to listen before naming what is seen.
To see more of Bumanglag’s work, visit her Format portfolio website and follow her on Instagram.
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Contributor
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Saanya Chopra is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, based in Ottawa. Working across painting, object-making, installation, and text, her work inhabits the intersections between material forms and language. She completed a BFA in painting and creative writing, receiving the Ottawa Art Gallery Graduating Student Award of Excellence.
