MANILA, Philippines - If Juan Luna were alive today, and if he wielded a camera instead of a brush, how would he do the “Spoliarium”?

We may soon find out.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the ’Spoliarium’ ever since I was a kid,” says award-winning Melbourne-based Filipino photographer Emmanuel “Mannix” Santos. “The old 50-peso bill used to have the ‘Spoliarium’ on it. I remember my grandfather had a reproduction of the ‘Spoliarium’ in our ancestral home because he was the barrio captain. So I grew up with the image but I never knew what it was about, except that Juan Luna became a national hero because of it.”

Today, of course, the painting has fallen a bit out of favor: art critics dismiss it as a somewhat mannered academic exercise, geomancers blame it in part for the nation’s bad collective feng shui, and only the Eraserheads managed to glean inspiration from it, stealing the title for one of their early songs.

But it continues to exert a fascination for Santos, who fully intends to pay due photographic homage to Luna’s work. And if his current work-in-progress, “The Passing of Light,” is any indication, it should prove revelatory.

Inspired by the “Book of Illumination,” an ancient text of the mystic Kabbalah, “The Passing of Light” is a portfolio of photographs depicting angels in the context of the modern world.

“After studying and dwelling on the Kabbalistic world in Israel, I realized that angels are really messengers of an energy emanating from a bigger world,” says Santos. “The 72 angels I’m putting together in this portfolio represent the 72 names of God as enumerated in Genesis and Exodus.”

The first part of the work, composed of 38 images, was exhibited last year at the silverlens gallery, and subsequently fetched a record $44,000 at an auction in Christie’s Hong Kong—the highest paid so far for contemporary Southeast Asian photography.

The project seems to have taken on a life of its own.

“I still have about 14 angels to go,” says Santos, but already the images are scheduled to be exhibited in Milan later this year, in the form of giant 1.8-meter by 1.8-meter hand-colored prints. A book is to follow soon after.

Eleven years in the making, the project was inspired in part by Santos’ meditations on the works of the Renaissance masters.

“If you were doing it during the Renaissance period, it would be easy because you could imagine it, you could make it up,” he says. “But if you’re a photographer, you can’t because you have to work with something realistic, something that already exists. If Michelangelo or Caravaggio or Da Vinci were photographers, how would they put together this interpretation of sacred or biblical texts?”

“So all my angels appear in the day-to-day places where human beings circulate and express their own existence. It’s a great metaphor for the duality of our existence. ‘The Passing of Light’ is just a manifestation of my day-to-day existence and my understanding and learning about life itself, my own pursuit of a higher wisdom that I have to give voice to. If I were a musician, I would perhaps have written a song about it; but as I am a photographer, I had to create a language to express what I have learned through this process, and that is the outcome of it.”

To realize the images in his mind’s eye, Santos went back to basics, eschewing digital cameras for a 50-year-old Rolleiflex and Kodak Tri-X film.

“It’s like the difference between slow food and fast food—what nourishes you more? For me, digital is too clean, it’s synthetic. And anything synthetic isn’t healthy from my point of view. Analogue photography is more nourishing than digital photography. That’s why I’m going back to using old cameras and using old films and the whole discipline of slow shooting.”

“Someone told me, ‘It wouldn’t have taken you 11 years if you had used digital photography and Photoshop.’ But it’s not the execution. The photographs were taken at 1/60 of a second, and the entire portfolio would have taken less than a minute if you add the exposures up. The beauty of analogue is in the anxiety: you don’t know what you have until a lot of processes are through, unlike digital where you click and if you’re unhappy with the result, you delete it. There’s no contemplation in between—and it’s the meditation in between the action and the finish where the beauty lies, because that’s where your heart starts to beat in complete passion. When you see the outcome, that’s when the energy comes back to you, the inspiration comes back to you.”

Adds Santos: “Photography is about concealment and revelation, what you hide and what you reveal. Digital photography is designed to create perfect pictures where everything is revealed, whereas there’s a level of anxiety when you work with the analogue process. There is still that fear that you may not have exposed the film properly, or processed the film the right way. A lot of the look and feel that my images have are a product of those mistakes and experiments. When I underprocessed my film, I got darker images, and that is the world of Renaissance light that Rembrandt and Caravaggio captured in their paintings because they worked by candlelight. That’s the beautiful thing about it, the simplicity. The more and more I mature, the less and less I put in it. Simplicity is more profound than having everything exposed.”

Santos was born in 1957 in Malolos, Bulacan and spent his formative years in Baguio and Sagada.

“I’ve always been fascinated and awed by photography, but the resources were never there,” he recalls. “My parents didn’t have that kind of money, and in their eyes it wasn’t a serious profession.”

So Santos studied engineering at St. Louis University in Baguio. To supplement his income, he worked as a folk singer at the Fireplace on Session Road. “It was there that I met my mentor, the Japanese war correspondent Masao Endo, who also influenced a lot of young Filipino photographers like Alex Baluyut, Romy Gacad and Wig Tysmans. He was photographing NPA activities up north, fresh from Afghanistan during the Russian invasion. He requested that I sing a Bob Dylan song, ‘Blowing in the Wind.’ After that I joined his table and said, ‘You must be a photographer with so many big impressive cameras and a Leica. I would like to be a photographer.’ He lent me a camera and said, ‘Take some pictures and return the camera to me tomorrow.’ So I did and we processed the film, and he said to me, ‘Do you want to be a photographer, or a singer or an engineer?’ I was already captivated from the moment I held the camera and pointed it, so right then and there I said, ‘I want to be a photographer.’ And he said, ‘Here’s the camera, take it, it’s yours.’ That was my first Nikon F2 with an f1.4 normal lens and a couple of rolls of Tri X, which I still use up to now.”

Santos worked for a while documenting the lives of Indochinese refugees in Bataan. While in Sagada, Santos met and married an Australian traveller named Suzanne and made the momentous decision to move to Melbourne. The early 1980s weren’t the best of times to be an Asian immigrant in Australia. A right-wing backlash had been growing in response to the waves of Vietnamese refugees, and Santos was often met with a hostile “Go back home to Asia where you belong!” from racists, and was occasionally spat on.

“That rejection became a challenge for me and gave me the strength to express what I wanted to express,” he says. “The isolation allowed me to look at a bigger picture: How do I see myself in the outside world? I didn’t see myself much in Australia so I started looking at the different tribal cultures.”

Melbourne is a melting pot, and Santos became fascinated by his neighbors, who belonged to the insular Hasidic Jewish community. Much to everyone’s surprise, he was able to gain access to this very private world, which no one—Jew or Gentile—had penetrated before, producing a remarkable photographic documentation that soon got him noticed. Santos has continued to document the Jewish diaspora over the last 25 years, travelling throughout the world and winning numerous awards for his portfolios, many of which have become part of the permanent collections of museums from Paris and the Ukraine to Malaysia and Australia. Later this year he will launch “One Land, One People and a Dream,” a book of photographs commissioned by the government of Israel to document its 137 cultural communities on the occasion of its 60th anniversary.

He is less known back home, although in 2000 he was the recipient of a Presidential artist award from Malacañang, and his profile is increasing thanks to “The Passing of Light” exhibit last year. While his documentary work keeps him busy and travelling most of the time, Santos intends to do more photographing and exhibiting in the Philippines.

“My photography is all about humanity,” he says. “When I do my social documentary or human essays, it’s all about the rites of passage and rituals that take place in our day-to-day life, portraying the universality of human existence from one culture to another.”