Envisioning the Philippine National Geographic: Photography and the Problem of Place

Envisioning the Philippine National Geographic: Photography and the Problem of Place

Photographic objects, practices, and discourses are critical for knowledge production and transmission. The graphic material form of the photograph helped enable the nation’s imagination, perhaps more than the novels and written news, to respond to Benedict Anderson’s thesis on print capitalism. In the years after independence, certain parts of the country were still being incorporated into the polity; hence, there was a fraught national recognition process. How did image-makers and Filipino viewers conjure images of what was deliberately identified and actively constructed as their country?

Becoming active photographers in the country’s burgeoning press after the Second World War, Filipinos constructed place as a problem. Photographic expeditions reaching the archipelago’s farthest ends and the cities’ nooks and crannies permitted amateur and professional photographers to satisfy and spur the curiosities of Filipinos about their own country. Fabricating exotica and historicizing locations, they composed pictures that wed spaces and places and a whole gamut of modern challenges: cultural ascriptions, rural life, urbanization, nation-state-building, and unequal development. Exploring Philippine photojournalism requires a disassembling of these pictorial metanarratives.

What were the vital activities of picture-taking that propagated the idea of places and the people in them as “problematic”? How did the community-imagining, homogenizing, and therefore standardizing photography facilities “see and sense” the various “others within” the nation? How were the problems “resolved” through and beyond photography? I aim to answer these questions in my attempt to relate Philippine photojournalism to its Southeast Asian counterparts.