Filipina land and photography
I just realized a few days ago how very little I knew about Filipino photography.
Yet, photography in the Philippines goes back to at least 1839, with the French government donating works that came out of the daguerreotype process and with several pieces coming out of these early works in the Philippines.
There are more works coming out now from the 19th and 20th centuries, but not enough is written about this. Again, I make no claims to expertise here, but a small number of anthropologists were intrigued by how photography and painting somehow “communicate” with each other and offer opportunities to exchange insights into this early medium of art.
Even more intriguing is how exchanges have almost always been masculine. Think about what you’ve seen, and again, it’s a handful of the handful of products, with little documentation.
I still remember a studio in San Juan (now Metro Manila) operated by a man with heavy, clunky equipment but who drew in many clients coming for single photos, duos or a whole “gang.” Later, and up to now, you still find antique dealers selling the prints, with “dedications” from people who had several copies made of their “recuerdos” (mementos). The photographs had a certain kind of intimacy which transcended time.
But I hope to gather more research materials during the semester as new students this semester begin to be intrigued by new meanings of the photographs, of the notes scribbled on them. What I’m intrigued by are the aspirations that clients projected onto the mementos and what happens as the souvenirs are sent from one destination to another. There are best wishes embedded in the “dedications,” some of which perhaps carried much more than an ordinary dedication.
Occasionally, too, there were dedications of dedications, of a Chinese family, for example, preparing the photograph to go back to China, now a family slowly being built, to be shared back in mainland China. (Many of the ones I’ve seen do not have that much written though, because the Chinese people’s literacy levels were low, or even absent, and they paid a scribe.)
Now come some mysteries, the many secrets carried through these letters. Did the overseas Chinese have a chance to check on what the scribes-for-pay were writing for them, or was it a perfunctory letter about how one is fine and hoping the recipient, too, is fine? And that someday they would meet again soon.
We come as well to the gender of the letter senders. I suspect most letters were sent by males, protocol not allowing displays of affection, or of sadness and longing. In my youth, I asked my paternal grandmother if she had loved my grandfather. She laughed, accompanied by “am kia” (loosely: silly child, what love do we speak of). Through the years, I learned bits and pieces of the husband’s and wife’s piecemeal relationship, perhaps even of love, in its own meanings.
My paternal grandmother also found herself taking on a new family: a second wife of her husband, a Filipina. This second wife died in childbirth, and my grandmother took on the children from the second wife, raising them as her own. They also learned to speak Chinese, but their lifeways were Filipino and a mix of Philippine languages.
In came photographs that had come in from China, which seemed to carry as much height as the letters. It took me years to figure out why she had cherished the letters. One time, she explained, “They were not my children, but they were my husband’s and I so owed them care too.” She took care of them until they, too, became adults, and her funeral was attended by these children of another mother.
And that is why the photographs were so important, some with no identification, but many with their own way of transmitting emotions. It’s probably too late to retrieve stories behind the photographs, but we still build them sometimes. Just last year, I visited the grave of an “adopted” uncle. He never had children, and the gravestone reflected this childlessness (and “spouseness”), but I was surprised to find my name was inscribed on this uncle’s gravestone as his child, using a symbolic term but nevertheless still as his child, someone who had come a long distance from China for a new life. I apologized to him for not knowing about his tombstone, and promised I would make sure his grave was well-kept and that he’d find peace in his new land and its kindness.
I snapped a photo, now a part of our life from and of China.
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michael.tan@inquirer.net
