The Camera and Vernacular Postmemory in the Philippine Archipelago
by Gaia Bernabe-Belvis
Introduction
The difficulty of tracing the chronology of vernacular photography in the Philippines is as disorienting as locating the physical images that attest to it, due to the country’s turbulent and violent history. One thing, however, remains clear and reflective of the country’s state of image-making: the act of taking a photograph is deeply rooted in the aggression of colonial practice.
This essay examines the chronological history of the camera from being a tool of colonial governance to an apparatus of memory for post-colonial everyday life, supported by interviews with Filipino vernacular artists, scholars, and my own mother, whose personal histories intersect within the current socio-economic and ecological conditions of physical images and memory-keeping in the Philippines.
The Philippines has suffered 385 years of direct colonization by Spain, Japan, a subtle attempt by the Netherlands and Great Britain, and even after the 1898 Philippine Revolution followed by American imperialism until 1946. The camera was introduced to the Philippines as early as the year 1841, when Spanish diplomat Sinibaldo de Mas photographed Filipinos using a daguerreotype camera. From the 1860’s, a few Dutch and British photographers settled in the Philippines and opened their photography studios in Manila using large-format cameras, however, these expensive studios were only accessible to the Filipino elite.
Following the infamous Mock Battle of Manila between Spanish and American forces, an event framed from The Treaty of Paris in 1898 as an exchange for the $20 million payment by Spain to the US and the fraudulent Philippines independence in 1898, the US ruled over the islands to colonize the country with anti-imperialist traditions by Americanizing the education system– from translating all textbooks to the English language and to instilling a revised history of American propaganda as a “civilized mission” to modernise Filipinos. The policies promised for the Philippines were freedom, Christian benevolence, and prosperity (Brewer, 2013), yet they continue to treat Filipinos as if they were “savages” through a persuasive conquest of “divine mission” as part of the US policy’s promise for freedom. Part of the US conquest conditions Filipinos for forced obedience within the American photographic lens, resulting in generational compliance. Photography functioned as a decentralized extension of state power, producing visual hierarchies that normalized domination. This ethnographic impulse, however, started the expansion of distinct racial types within the archipelago known as the “civilized” Filipinos in the lowlands and “native” Filipinos in the highlands. This racial distinction acting as an “ethnographic study” problematizes the Filipino people’s status and living conditions, resulting in internalized racism towards each other’s very own local communities. It is weaponized through Dean C. Worcester’s early vernacular images and personal observations in his book The Philippine Islands and Their People (1899).
It is important to know that Filipinos were never blinded by the ongoing suffering that struck their homeland for 385 years. Despite literature being the main method of communication among revolutionist groups La Liga Filipina and Katipunan, there are still traces of the camera which documented a nuanced yet isolated history of Spanish colonization in a Filipino point-of-view. Photographs, like Katipuneros, suggest a counter-archive emerging from the structures that classify Filipinos. In contrast to the colonial camera, which operated as a tool of administrative legibility, images like Katipuneros situate the camera as a device through which Filipinos made themselves visible on their own terms. Manila Bulletin journalist Sol Vanzi (2020) recalls working with veteran ABS-CBN cameraman Doming Topacio in 1968 for an interview assignment in Imus, Cavite with aging Katipuneros (Figure 1), one of them being Topacio’s grandfather. They shared this momentous photograph right before the “Battle of Alapan” on May 28, 1898, which, according to them, should be the correct date for the independence day in the Philippines. Rather than reducing them as subjects of disciplinary power, the photograph presents the Katipuneros as a collective force.
Figure 1.
Katipuneros, Cavite, 1898. Courtesy of Sol Vanzi for Manila Bulletin.
Dean C. Worcester’s The Philippine Islands and Their People (1898)
Dean C. Worcester and his photographic assistant Charles Martin traveled throughout the archipelago to conduct investigations into their new colony’s ethnic landscape through mapping and census-taking practices (Capozzola, 2012). Worcester was appointed Secretary of the Interior to the Philippine Commission from 1901 until 1913, solidifying imperial control by governing non-Christian tribes in the Philippine highlands. In his book, The Philippine Islands and Their People (1898), Worcester catalogued and classified Filipinos who lived outside the capital city of Manila as “natives” and “savages” as though they were objects of study, interspersing photographs of people with images of ethnographic artifacts for their own amusement and claiming of possession as their colony. Worcester further developed “yardstick photos”, wherein Worcester placed his own body as a makeshift unit of measurement, visually positioning himself beside Filipino bodies as subjects to be scaled, compared, and classified to show the physical disparity between two different races. These photographs do not merely represent hierarchy, it enacts it, and the state produces it as the “truth”.
Figure 2.
Negrito man, type 1, and myself, to show relative size, Bulacan, 1901
Dean Worcester’s Photographic Collection, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology
Figure 3.
Portrait of Igorot Man and Woman in Costume with Ornaments, Bontoc, 1902
Dean Worcester’s Photographic Collection, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology
One of Worcester’s earliest staged photographs in 1901, a Filipina carrying her baby in front of a draped white cloth, presents a static portrait in which the subjects have a visual distance from their cultural context. The positioning of the figures and the choice of background impose objectification, framing them more as specimens for study than as participants in their own lived reality.
Figure 4.
Negrito mother with child in her arms. Full-length side view, Bulacan, 1901
Dean Worcester’s Photographic Collection, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology
Worcester rarely photographed Manila’s elite; however, when he did, he often captured members of the Illustrados, educated Filipino elites who had economically benefited from the Spanish rule. These portraits were highly composed, presenting the subjects almost as if they are like painted portraits of aristocrats. Now emphasizing status, refinement, and authority, it positions Filipinos in a state of control and detachment.
Figure 5.
Don Pedro Sanz, his Visayan wife, his sons-in-law, daughters, and grandchildren, Manila, 1899
Dean Worcester’ Photographic Collection, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology
The end of US rule, however, marked a gradual shift in how photography is understood and operated. The post-war Philippine zeitgeist is marked by both cultural awakening and profound grief. After centuries of colonial rule and the devastation of World War II, did photography become a refusal of institutional control?
On National Witnessing Post World War II
In 1946, when the Philippines achieved independence from US rule, Filipino photographers began reclaiming the camera as a horizontal mode of remembering. An example photo from below shows a documented day of Americans troops fleeing back to their country. The American flag was still up and waving, however, Filipino photographer Teodulo Protomartir needed to photograph the ruins that he saw at present, simply because of the act of concretizing his witnessing. Manzanilla (2020) describes this as a ‘photographic imperative’ or an impulse shared not only by photographers but by all who encounter objects, phenomena, or events worth witnessing. The urge to look closely at the ruins of war-torn Manila fulfills this imperative. Protomartir’s works captured post-war Manila, the slow restoration of the architecture and landscape, and everyday musings of Filipinos in Ermita, Quiapo, and Intramuros. These moments, initially thought to be buried in memories and no records left, actually survived through the hands of Uro de la Cruz. Not until 2011 did acclaimed Filipino cinematographer Uro de la Cruz salvage Protomartir’s archive of negatives from a local antique store in Manila. Thousands of them had signs of moisture and erosion due to neglect and the simple fact that these negatives could not withstand the Philippine temperature. Despite everything, De la Cruz was determined to scan as much as he could before he passed away in 2016. Teodulo Protomartir shifted photography from an administrative gaze to a civic witnessing through the 35mm Club by encouraging members to produce everyday, candid images reflective of domestic life, public spaces, and community gatherings.
Figure 6.
After the celebration, Manila, 1946 by Teodulo Protomartir
Courtesy of Silverlens Gallery
Banal image-making is essential to Filipinos’ method of memory-making. It becomes decentralized and less authoritative, as the 35mm format becomes accessible to everyone. However, even when photography finally moved out of colonial institutions, it did not escape the micro-structures of authority embedded within family life. The domestic camera can still produce idealized narratives, erase discomfort in favor of celebration, or even casually show a power dynamic. The micro-structures of authority that I’ve traced in colonial photography reappear, quietly, in the family albums I collected from people with whom I also interviewed.
The State of Physical Images and Memory-Keeping
The Philippines, consisting of 7,641 islands, is prone to tropical cyclones and typhoons due to its location on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. Heavy rains and floods result in casualties among Filipinos and the destruction of homes, infrastructure, and personal belongings — including family photo albums. For anthropologist Marielle Calicdan (preferably called Cali), she finds it ironic as someone who works in a museum to come to a realization that it is both interesting and sad—how climate, ecology, and disaster vulnerability shape not just national history, but very personal histories too. She searched through her family archive and shared a special photograph of her grandparents, Lola Loring and Lolo Sianong, in Pangasinan around 1985. In Figure 7, they look very camera-shy and a bit uncomfortable. Cali’s emotional attachment to this photo is rooted in never meeting both of them, as they passed away several years before she was born. For her, this photograph reminds her that she took generations to make. Her ancestors farmed, fished, and sold fresh produce in the market to make ends meet, for their children and their grandchildren to live more comfortably.
Figure 7.
Lola Loring and Lolo Sianong, Pangasinan, 1985
Courtesy of Marielle Calicdan
“This is the only photo I have of my grandparents on my father’s side, so my entire idea of what they looked like comes from this single, two-dimensional image. I asked my dad if they had more photos—he said there were a lot, especially from their “provincial” wedding (whatever he meant by that)—but everything was destroyed when their house was damaged by Typhoon Norming (Typhoon Faye) in 1982. I even had to look it up, and there were barely any photos of that typhoon online. It’s strange to think that this is the only visual trace I have of them. I sometimes wonder how many photos of my dad as a kid I could’ve seen if those disasters hadn’t happened.” Cali stated.
Ecological conditions, such as typhoons, reveal the archive’s fragility, and the fact that what survives is often not what anyone would have chosen. The single photo of Cali’s two camera-shy grandparents is a counter-archive by accident.
For lens-based artist Czar Kristoff J.P., this loss was not abstract: 31 years ago, super-typhoon Rosing (Angela) damaged most of his family's belongings, and the experience made him acutely aware of the value of memory-keeping. Carrying that trauma for a long time and despite the attempts to move forward from the scars, his practice is grounded in this memory of loss. That there will always be a crisis in photography – hence the attempts of actively sharing and storing photos in mega clouds (social media) but even that, the artist knows that someday the infrastructure will collapse hence enforcing the pixels return to grains through prints and books produced in neighbourhood copy and risograph shops, and let these images become part of other people’s library and archive, distributing the weight of the images that the artist is trying to preserve.
His latest body of work, Touch by Touch (2023), is a four-chapter sensory publication that exhumes the artist’s reflections in place, migration, and memory. The chapter moves through found illustrations of endemic birds in the Netherlands; sticker leftovers printed in colored paper; banderitas photographed at night in Laguna; a series of “Fragrantica” perfume illustrations associated with his father, mother, and grandmother printed on looser pages of columnar books, en versa are black and white photos of his father while working in Iraq during early 80s. The images show visible molds and moisture damaged along its edges – signs of the humid climate that slowly consumes physical photographs in the Philippines. Fruit stickers were mounted on a transparency sheet on top of the photograph when it was replicated through an old photocopy machine.
Figure 8.
Touch by Touch (reprinted in transparent film), Laguna, 2023
Courtesy of Czar Kristoff J.P.
Figure 9.
Original image of Czar’s father, Iraq, 1980s
Courtesy of Czar Kristoff J.P.
Czar Kristoff JP worked with Touch By Touch while preparing for a year-long fellowship in the Netherlands but then the sudden death of his mother became a deciding factor not to push the trip which added new personal meaning to the project. As the 15 copies circulate, the intimate moments in the artist's memory both the distant past and the last moment with his mother were unfolded and shared with the individuals who are also dealing with grief and loss. This approach of preservation of images can be seen as a refusal of the institution but also is a reminder of the magic of solidarity in the fragility.
The ecological crisis runs quietly through the work too: the warm climate and the frequency of natural disasters in the Philippines mean that the physical storage of photographs is always under threat, and what survives is never guaranteed.
Back in March this year, I had the chance to visit my mother’s ancestral home in the southern island of the Philippines to look through her family’s archive of photo albums, one of which was a handmade photo album by my great-grandfather Tatay Nano. To my surprise, he was an amateur photographer while owning the first rice and coffee mill business in Calinan, on the western outskirts of Davao City. Their lives on the farm were well-documented back then.
Figure 10.
Tatay Nano’s handmade photo album, Davao del Sur, 2026
Courtesy of Mariano Bernabe & Family
In this photo album he made, he documented his wife and five children from the early 50s until the 80s. He was fascinated by the workings of a camera and he had great attention to detail. Tatay Nano photographed each and every important event of his children until the late 90s, having that knack of photographic imperative. However, since the ancestral home is located directly beside a river and a bridge, the house experienced frequent floods, due to heavy rains. The floods brought by the rainy season were compounded by the intense heat of the dry season. Even though the ancestral home is a half hour drive away from the mountains, the town experiences a very warm climate. Tatay Nano’s impulse to preserve was quietly undone by the very conditions he lived in.
Figure 11.
My grandfather’s brother Edgar, Calinan, 1951
Courtesy of Mariano Bernabe & Family
Figure 12.
My grandfather’s brother, Edgar, on his birthday, Calinan, 1957
Courtesy of Mariano Bernabe & Family
Figure 13.
Untitled, Davao, 1970s
Courtesy of Mariano Bernabe & Family
Tatay Nano’s usual shots are family milestones – first steps, Baptisms, weddings, graduation photos, and birthdays. All we see are happy moments; the ones that show sadness, grief, or death are rare. Tatay Nano seemed to show the “perfect” family. Tatay Nano strove for precision in his photos. Most of his prints are calculated, staged, and strict. This tendency may have influenced him from being close friends with the owners of the two photo studios in Calinan. One example is a set of images of my mother when she was a toddler where she grew visibly tired after being photographed. “My nanay brought me a new dress to wear for the next Sunday mass. When we got back home, tatay wanted to take nice photos of me and my dress, which I didn’t mind at first. But smiling in the same position for longer than fifteen minutes became exhausting, I couldn’t hide my annoyance anymore!” my mother laughs.
Figure 14.
My mother, Ada Vera, Calinan, 1980s
Courtesy of Mariano Bernabe & Family
The staged, calculated, milestone-only shots that survived amidst experiencing yearly typhoons, directly show the patriarch’s vision as Tatay Nano curates the family’s self-image. My mother’s exhaustion in the dress photos is the moment the performance slips, and it’s only visible because she was there to tell the story behind it. This is not to reiterate that family photography is evil, but it is that the micro-structures of authority in these moments do not disappear when the colonial institution does. They migrate inward, into the home, into the album, into who gets to say this is us, we exist.
Figure 15.
Tatay Nano (far right) with his rice mill workers, Calinan, 1980s
Courtesy of Mariano Bernabe & Family
Photos can mask reality. It is fairly common in family albums because no one wants to remember a moment where someone is sad, confused, or simply uninterested in being photographed. Though some photographs carry traces of what they were meant to conceal, those traces often only become visible when the subject speaks. For Filipina artist MM Yu, she recalls that family albums tend to present an idealized version of family life, where joy and togetherness are emphasized. Everyday struggles and conflicts create a gap in the visual record, where important aspects of ordinary life, labor, hardship, complexity remain undocumented. In this way, vernacular photographs preserve what families chose to remember, rather than the full reality of lived experience.
Figure 16.
MM’s 5th birthday, Manila, 1983
Courtesy of MM Yu
On Figure 16, MM shares a photograph during her fifth birthday party. It is often said earliest lasting memories start around the age of five, she can barely remember that day. This image is a substitute for a memory she cannot recall, that her 5th birthday party existed. Supposedly, the image is a record of celebration. The photograph is a memory replacement. When the image substitutes for experience, it does not simply record the past, it authors it too.
In Manila, I was curious to see what survived institutionally. I visited the Lopez Museum and Library, where I was lucky enough to access their photo archive dating back to the 1860s. Searching through the online catalog under post-war everyday life, the images accessible to the public are mostly birthday parties of politicians (Figure 17), celebrities, inauguration events, news articles (Figure 18), and marketing materials photographed by Western photographers (Figure 19). It was disappointing, though not entirely surprising. The Philippine government has never invested seriously in making cultural heritage accessible to ordinary people. And perhaps families, sensing that indifference, never offered their private images to institutions in the first place, and vice versa. The result is a gap that no library can fill. Walking through antique stores in Binondo, I came across boxes of loose negatives and photo prints. These are families I know nothing about, unnamed and unclaimed, surviving by accident rather than by care. Technically preserved, but completely unmoored from the families and stories they belong to.
Figure 17.
Claro M. Recto’s birthday party, Manila, 1950s
Courtesy of Lopez Museum & Library
Figure 18.
Pope John Paul VI visited laborer Carlos Navarro and his family in Tondo, Manila, 1970
Courtesy of Lopez Museum & Library and Philstar
Figure 19.
Sunset On Pasay Beach, Manila Bay, Manila, 1950s
Courtesy of Lopez Museum & Library
Despite the camera being accessible to households, vernacular photographs tend to have an idealised version of family life. Joy and togetherness are emphasized and everyday struggles and conflicts create a gap in the visual record, where important aspects of ordinary life, labor, hardship, and complexity remain undocumented. Not only that, there is institutional neglect and ecological fragility to be considered.
Memory survives not through institutions, but through kinship, and when kinship breaks down, it ends up in a box waiting for an observer.
About the Author
Gaia Bernabe-Belvis (born in 2001, in Davao del Sur, Philippines) is a BA Photography student at the University of Europe, Berlin. Her work explores belonging, memory, and the intimate spaces that shape identity. Through a documentary-conceptual approach, she examines how personal and collective histories intersect within migrant communities. Rooted in empathy and research-driven curiosity, her practice focuses on visual storytelling and the preservation of cultural memory. In addition to her photographic practice, she teaches basic black & white and colour film development and organises exhibitions. She is a co-founder of Lakambini, a non-profit & women-led organisation, which fosters inclusivity, visibility, and creative growth for Filipina artists through a variety of formats.
She was an intern at the Eidolon Centre from November 2025 to June 2026. We are grateful for her dedicated work and valuable contributions during this period.
You can visit Gaia's website on this link.
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