Meet the Philippine photographers capturing the human cost of Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly crackdown on drugs

The radio crackled. Linus Guardian Escandor knew what was coming. The station would report a summary execution. He would squeeze into a pick-up truck with four other photojournalists, speed through Manila to some slum or dark alley and arrive while the bodies still lay in the streets.

Their hands would likely be tied, their faces wrapped in tape, blood flowing from bullet wounds in their heads and chests.

For more than a month, the scene had played out every night – often twice a night, sometimes more. But on this Thursday morning at 2am, it hadn’t – so Escandor, a 37-year-old freelance photo­grapher, sat in the press room at Manila’s police headquarters with about a dozen other photojournalists, the TV on mute, just listening to the radio crackle.

“In the morning, if you shoot dead people, it’s gory, but at night it’s almost beautiful,” he said, clicking through photos on his laptop. “You can hide the blood, because of the shadows. It’s psychedelic, the colours.”

When Escandor began working the graveyard shift in 2014, he mainly covered fires and car accidents. Then, this June, Rodrigo Duterte came to power as president of the Philippines. Duterte, a tough-talking, 71-year-old former mayor of the southern city of Davao, had campaigned on promises to eradicate the country’s drug problem within six months.

Since Duterte was inaugurated on June 30, the bodies have been piling up. And thus Escandor found himself on the execution beat. He and his colleagues have spent every night chasing “The Shot” – something powerful enough to shine a light on the crackdown’s human cost.

On July 23, Escandor and his colleagues were covering a summary execution when they got wind of a nearby incident, so they drove to the scene, and what they found there shocked them.