A World Apart

City Life

Award-winning documentary photographer Wendell Phillips finds his most powerful subjects among the disadvantaged

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By Gary Stephen Ross published Dec 1, 2008

Image Credit: Wendell Phillips

Award-winning documentary photographer Wendell Phillips finds his most powerful subjects among the disadvantaged

"That's about it," said Wendell Phillips, surveying the gear arrayed on the floor of the Alberni Street condo he shares with his wife, a provincial court judge. "Laptop. Two cameras. Four fixed lenses. A flash. Two portable 80-gigabyte hard drives. This cable loops around my camera bag at night. It has a motion sensor, and an alarm goes off if anyone moves the bag."

It was early June, and Phillips, 46, was about to travel on assignment to Palestinian refugee camps in Syria; then on to jobs in Jordan, northern Iraq, and the West Bank in Israel.

View a slideshow
of Wendell Phillips's work

"Any Israeli retaliation from its northern border against Hezbollah shouldn't affect my ground travel," he said, "but if any part of Syria becomes a staging area, I'm hooped. I'm getting briefed daily by colleagues in Beirut and Damascus."

First aid kit. Tylenol. NeoCitran. Penicillin. Simpliflux, for diarrhea. Doxycycline, an antimalarial. "I'm up-to-date with my immunizations—cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and B, yellow fever. I've never had malaria or dengue, but I got something after spending 14 months in the Philippines, eating and drinking locally, that plagued me for years. Every five weeks or so I became unwell. It was like chronic fatigue-I could barely get out of bed, and when I did I was nauseous. Eventually it cleared up on its own. They never really figured out what it was."