EXHIBITS

Imperial Reproductions: Imag(in)ing the Philippines in Color: Seventy-four plates from the W.H. Harnish Collection of the University of the Philippines, now historically precious photographic glass slides on the Philippines, will be exhibited at the Atelyer of the Bulwagan ng Dangal, the University Heritage Museum. The 74 plates, hand-tinted by its maker, were to be reproduced as color plate illustrations for official reports, postcards, and souvenir photos intended for visiting American colonial administrators, soldiers, dependents, tourists, and continental academics exploring the physical and cultural scope of its very first colony.

Through the exhaustive effort of empirical photo-cataloguing of the archipelago’s biospheric, ethnographic, and topographic resources, colonial administrators felt that they could grasp for themselves the comprehensiveness of the task needed to identify, control, transform, and extract whatever “assets” were needed to further the twin colonial enterprises of capitalist exploitation and tutelage.

Scanning the various aspects of Philippine life are hand-drawn, painted, or photographic images on glass suited for projection. As a documentary form, these were introduced in the United States in the 1850s and were popular all throughout the First World War. This prevalence owed to the attraction of color, as well as the capacity of the medium, to reach a larger audience through projection. This kind of reach gave photography the chance to lay claim to a broader constituency, changing it from an intimate art of memorabilia to a mass-scale instrument of entertainment, education, and popular culture.

A sense of distant outpost pervades the ambience of these photographs. The land of the conquered colony known as the Philippine Islands is significantly transformed through the cultivation of America. Seen in the larger background of tutelage and apprenticeship to the democratic tradition, as sustained by the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and Benevolent Assimilation, the Philippines is portrayed as a state of nature to be taught in the school of culture.