Hannah Reyes Morales and her daughter Amihan Ilaya in London. Photographed by Sharif Hamza for the September 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines
Hannah Reyes Morales has spent the last decade and a half telling the story of how humanity finds a way to endure through devastation, becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist along the way. Now, she’s turning her gaze toward something closer to home: her own life.
Hannah Reyes Morales is on the road again.
It’s only been a few days since she got back from a reporting trip in Vietnam and between edits, correspondences with her editor and the requisite circadian reentrainment (she did, after all, just travel from the other side of the world), she’s also managed to hop on a Zoom call to catch up with me, from her apartment in London.
In many ways, this has been her life since she was 19, when an internship for the European Pressphoto Agency jump-started a celebrated, internationally awarded career in photojournalism. But in other ways, the trip to Vietnam was entirely unprecedented, more daunting than any of her previous assignments. Last year, she became a mother, giving birth to a child named Amihan Ilaya. The Vietnam trip was her first assignment away from her.
On the field, Reyes Morales found herself negotiating the dualities of her new life in real time. “I was in the reporting car just pumping and chucking my milk out the window. It was a different level of ferality,” she says, with a laugh. “It was so gross, but it was also quite funny. You have your system of [having] all your equipment and your gear and then suddenly, it includes breast pumps.”
I met Reyes Morales almost 15 years ago, when she was just a prodigious photographer who sometimes took photos for Young Star, the weekend youth section of The Philippine Star, that I edited for a few years in the 2010s. Even at 20, when she was still a college student finding her voice as a photographer, it was clear that Reyes Morales was in possession of a preternatural eye and a determined focus, that it would only be a matter of time until that potential would find its purpose.
“I think that’s why I’m always drawn to figuring out how other people have managed difficult things in life… People have their own way of finding grace in that.”
Since then, that youthful promise has been honed into a generational talent, a documentary photographer who can stand beside the world’s best, whose work regularly appears in The New York Times and National Geographic, who has earned major distinctions like the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award and the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism. Last year, she became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series of photographs she took for the Times documenting the “youthquake” in Africa.
But lately, Reyes Morales has been reflecting on her 20-year-old self. “I think about that time a lot,” she says. “That version of me, the young naive, bright-eyed photographer who really believed in the power of photography… And then, obviously, you get into the work and you realize how much more complicated life is, how much more complicated and nuanced stories are. You feel the limits of what a frame is and can be. And you’re trying to track the edges of it.
“I’ve been trying to summon that [version of myself],” Reyes Morales says. “I suppose, because I am in another beginning again.”
We’re talking at the end of a year of great upheaval that has led her to reckon with her past lives. “Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is that you come to a point where decisions that you make when you were young, that didn’t feel so life-changing or consequential [at the time], are now decisions that are part of your history in a very real way,” she says, “that you can’t erase and you can’t look back on.”
She’s building a life in London, the city she’s called home since giving birth. “I’m living a very London mom life,” she says. Before our interview, for example, she and her child Amihan attended a “bass for babies” gig, where two musicians play the double bass for moms and their babies. (“This is so wild, a Friday,” she laughs.) She’s also begun to find a community in fellow creative mothers: fellow photographers, filmmakers and artists.
Early in her pregnancy, feeling uncertain about her own capacity for caregiving and her own ability to create a home, Reyes Morales applied the methodology of photojournalism to motherhood, gathering data during her various assignments, as if reporting the story she would tell her child.
“I stayed with an indigenous community [in the Philippines] while I was pregnant, and it was really wonderful,” she says. “You’re just lying down in the banig and just having a different lens into how they care for a pregnant woman, which then translates to child care. I went to the Arctic [seven months pregnant] and visited different homes there and the community welcomed me. They did a little naming ritual for my child.”
Growing up in a single-parent household, she wondered if she could create the kind of home her child might need. “My mom and I have had an up-and-down relationship through time. It was only us, so it was always just the two of us. And one thing that has sort of really been present with me is the understanding that what I had growing up was everything that she could give,” she says. A few months into motherhood, she’s learning that “in some way, my mom was also breaking some cycles.”
See more of this story in the Anniversary Issue of Vogue Philippines, available at the link below.
By RAYMOND ANG. Portraits by SHARIF HAMZA. Editor AUDREY CARPIO. Talent: Hannah Reyes Morales. Vogue Producer: Anz Hizon. Agency Producer: Lorna Doherty. Studio Manager On-Site: Justyna. Photo Assistant: Max McKay.
