Photography in The Philippines - Filipino Life, Culture, and Identity Through Images

Filipino Life, Culture, and Identity Through Images

As a tool for presenting Philippine culture and identity, photography revealed that Filipinos during the Spanish period and American colonialism had a distinct society of their own. During the late 1800s, both elite Spanish and Filipino members of Philippine society employed photographs as recorders of social lifestyle. Before American colonialism took hold of the Philippine Islands, an American photographer shot photos of the people and life in the City of Manila in 1886. Without the influence of American colonialistic attitude, the photographer was able to record the actual and uncontrolled street life of Filipino people living in the city, including cleanly dressed vendors with “religious necklaces” and a young Filipino lad collecting water from a public pump. The photographer’s images presented Filipinos exuding natural grace and self-confidence in front of his camera, without any sign of being intimidated by the photograph taker’s technological instrument.

In the 1930s, photography was incorporated it by Filipinos to become an “indigenized” part of Philippine culture and society. Examples of this cultural incorporation include photographing of weddings, wakes, portraits of Filipino beauty pageant queens, politicians, cult leaders, and popular Philippine sceneries and panorama. From 1935 to 1941 – the Philippine Commonwealth period – Filipino politicians utilized photography as a means for propaganda and election agenda. Later on, the boom in Philippine photography, resulted to photographic albums bound and collected by Filipino families that preserved recorded baptisms, school life, family reunions, social gatherings and outings, marriages, wedding anniversaries, wakes, and funerals. For them, photography has become a tool for preserving familial genealogy and societal history, recorded imageries that are handed down continuously from one generation to another.

The Filipinos developed their own unique character of posing in front of the camera. Because they are sensitive and self-conscious to how they should present and portray themselves through photographs, Filipino individuals or groups are not passive posers. Photographically, they are able to project a “certain style (…) or aspect” of themselves. In viewing images, Filipinos find “layers of meaning about the (…) character and persona” of the subject, or subjects, caught in the photograph.