Book Review of Casanave: An American Photographer in Iloilo by Nereo Cajilig Lujan (National Historical Commission of the Philippines, 2021)
At the onset, it is already clear that Casanave as a coffee table book has humble, but nonetheless ideologically loaded, intensions. In his foreword, historian Demy Sonza considers the book “most valuable in the study and appreciation of the history of Iloilo” (p. xi) and claims to bring readers back to the city’s and the province’s “glorious past” (p. xii). Meanwhile in Nereo Cajilig Lujan’s preface, he asserts that the photographs could serve as “time machines” (p. xiii) to the early 20th century. Indeed, the book published by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines is primarily structured to serve these appreciative, if not nostalgic, goals. Reception of the book has confirmed this. Vic Salas calls it a “tribute to what many consider a “Golden Age””, while Tara Yap, using social media lingo, dubbed the book as “photographic throwback.”
Lujan went through the painstaking task of hunting down and gathering a portion of photos Pedro Casanave produced during his professional career lasting more than three decades. He never published an album, hence the photos had to sourced from museums, libraries, private collections, and online resources. Lujan also provides a biography of Casanave, and how his life “intertwined with Philippine history” (p. xiii), namely the developments of the American colonial period and the then still young practice of photography in the country. With these overlapping narrative directions, an immediate issue with the book is the absence of labels for photos or an index at the end. Lujan frequently oscillates between a chronological and thematic ordering of photos that it is quiet hard to focus while going through the first sections of the book. In referring to selected photos, I will indicate the pages where they are found, similar to identifying where direct quotes are located.
Lujan admits being a photography and history enthusiast, he’s a trained journalist, rather than a scholar of visual culture, which lays bare the book’s premilinary, but at the same time, equally pathbreaking nature. “The story is incomplete and I hope, should more questions arise in the future,” he writes, “another historian will fill whatever gap is found in this work.” (p. xiv) I think there is little to add to the rigorous research Lujan has already done (see Lujan, 2016). Instead, I approached Casanave in a more critical and interdisciplinary lens, underscoring the meanings produced by the images presented and how Lujan contextualized them.
The opening four chapters of the book centers on Casanave’s life, along with that of his family, and later of his studio and practice in Iloilo. As a young man Pedro Casanave trained under photographer Theodore Lilienthal in New Orleans, before shifting to a career in music. When the Spanish-American War broke out, erupting amid the wars of independence in Cuba and the Philippines, he enlisted in the US Volunteers Regiment becoming a staff in its band. When the Americans started establishing colonial institutions in areas they have pacified in the Philippines, Casanave briefly worked as a state treasurer in two provinces. He left his government post in 1905, and went to Iloilo City with a young Filipina wife coming from the local elite, to set up its first photography studio.
He wasn’t the first photographer, whether foreign or local, to record the region but setting up operations here granted him the opportunity to witness the development of Iloilo City, and its nearby rural municipalities, as it rose from the ruins of war to becoming an important economic center second to the national capital, Manila. Unfortunately, the handful of documents and letters in the book didn’t reveal any of his creative motivations aside from commercial purposes. Casanave had considerable success doing portraiture, dabbling in photojournalism, and most especially producing Real Picture Postcards (RPP) sold as souvenirs to foreigners. The book right away frames that because of Casanave’s position, especially his settling in the colony, his work is different from his more popular contemporaries and how they contributed to the US’ imperial imaginary of its territories.
Casanave didn’t take staged pictures of indigenous peoples like Dean Worcherster (see Rice, 2014) or publish an album like Frank Tennyson Neely that contained morbid images of dead Filipino revolutionaries (see Niedermeier, 2016). However, a purely commercial frame is not immune to the slippages of the US’ imperial project. Casanave’s photos obscures colonial violence through showing the literal facade of its achivements; along with its implementors, collaborators, and beneficiaries all in diginified poses. This is a ample opening for intervention by Lujan through his annotations and captions, but by only providing “historical trivia” (p. xiv) for context, he in turn reinforces the original purpose of the photos being catered to the colonial gaze. Following Allan Punzalan Isaac (2006), Casanave’s photos, and their re-presentation by a state agency no less, is a symptom of the continuous reproduction of US imperialism’s invisibility to itself.
When not photographing structures and landscapes, Casanave’ pictures are of people either in labor or in leisure. Portraiture is only accessible to an affluent clientele, and by extension Casanave documented house parties and events like concerts in high society circles. On the other hand, Casanave also recorded the daily scenes of the lower class population; farmers working in rice fields (p. 86), harvesting of salt beds (p. 94), and women weavers at work (pp. 52-3). It is curious where Lujan decided to locate a portion such images in the books’ structure. Specifically, in the early part where he is introducing the geographical and economic features of the region. In a collage of idyllic rural scenes; people in thatched houses, a woman bathing in a river, a man on top of a water buffalo (pp. 42-3), Lujan has a section about the “origins of the people of Iloilo.” (pp. 42-3) He cites the Maragtas legend, a controversial migration narrative previously considered historical fact but has been proven to be otherwise (see Scott, 1984). Introducing the native population through this, gives them an air of legendary origins, as if they are part of the landscape when the Americans arrived.
These anonymous natives are uncannily exotic in contrast to Casanave’s peopleless architectural photography, the genre making up majority of his work found in the fifth and largest section of the book. For example, an obvious landmark of America’s civilizing mission are hospitals, Casanave has photos of the two earliest ones in the city, Iloilo Mission Hospital (p. 153) which first opened in 1905 and Saint Paul’s Hospital (pp. 66-7) following suit in 1916. Lujan contextualizes these institutions by providing basic information like their locations, patrons, and the religious orders that managed them. In sum, players belonging to the power elite during American period. Regarding Saint Paul’s Hospital he writes that it was “managed by the Sisters of Saint Paul of Chartres, it was built…at the behest of Msgr. Dennis J. Dougherty, bishop of Jaro” with “Dr. Samuel Carson of the Philippine Railway Company, [as] the hospital’s first director.” (p. 66) Trivia like these feel wanting as numerous studies have been made about locating the ulterior motives of setting up a public health care infastructure in colony, namely the training of a cheap nursing force able to remedy the shortages in the US (see Choy, 2003). Nurses and other healthcare workers remain a top ‘export’ of the Philippines to this day, as the postcolonial state continues to fulfill its labor-brokerage function first institutionalized during the American period (see Rodriguez, 2010).
A similar altruistic tone can sensed in the captions discussing photos of university buildings, like what would become the University of the Philippines Visayas (UPV) (p. 29) and Central Philippine University (CPU) (p. 146). Before being donated to UPV after World War Two, Lujan considers Iloilo City Hall as a “foremost landmark”, and emphasizes its formal prowess, “designed by renowned architect Juan Arellano while Italian artist Francesco Riccardo Monti created the magnificent sculptures that adorn its facade.” (p. 28) The neoclassical structure is of course part a of larger scheme of American colonial policy in using the architectural style to assert what Gerard Lico calls a “visual narrative of imperial ambition and cultural attainment” (2021a, p. 271). Meanwhile the philantrophic nature of CPU was highlighted, “Founded by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Soceity, it was initially an elementary vocational school for poor boys who worked for their board and tuition.” (p. 147) Lujan mentions that though it was established in 1905, CPU only started admitting female students in 1913. Modeled after American institutions, these schools, and an overall public education system, would be pivotal enforcing a proficiency in English and training a pacified technocratic class—a process Renato Constantino (1966) bluntly labeled as miseducation. A case where the colonial racial order is most undeniable is illustrated in the photo of the Iloilo Golf Club (p. 173), the oldest one in the country. Lujan considers this a “legacy” of British and Scottish engineers that built the railway system in Panay. Admittedly, it was “exclusive for expatriates” (p. 172) until 1920 when it allowed membership of Filipinos, Lujan then lists prominent politicians and industrialists.
Though Casanave’s photos of the local population are reverent and those of structures are made to stand on their own, an underlining theme in his body of work is revealing the how far is the extent in which the city and the region is integrated into the political and economic networks of the US empire. The dominance of images of early ports, roads, warehouses, railways, and airport brings to mind Marx’ claim, in Grundrisse, that capital “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” Not as sensational as the work of his contemporaries, they nonetheless are taken and circulated to attract investors, or at least visitors, to Iloilo. Casanave’s photos, and Lujan’s book, at its most sincere, then serves an origin myth of a city and a province, while at its worse, a yearning for a lost Eden. Viewing these images at the present confronts readers of the contradiction of this “glorious past” as one is also exposed to colonialism’s uneven development though this is done subtlety and can only be extracted by close reading of the trivia provided. For example, it is a big loss when the regional railway system wasn’t properly rehabilitated during the postwar years, but one must come into terms that it was built to primarily accommodate the needs of the lucrative sugar industry, with the US as its biggest market, and not for mass public transport (pp. 108-9).
In the light of recent campaigns to push for preservation tourism one can sense that Casanave’s images of colonialism taking root has parallels with the further entry of neoliberalism glimpsed in the renewed interest in the period’s remaining structures, if not ruins. Portions of Iloilo City, as well as other places in the country, also continue to mimic foreign architectural designs, an “obsession for legitimacy though invented European heritage”(Lico, 2021b, p.762). Casanave’s photos, circulating in social media might elicit nostalgic responses, but a deeper look would reveal they are in fact an anticipation of the city’s current sprawl and its manifold and persistent problems. This premonitionary aura is a reason why Lujan’s book should be read and be engaged with. In order to rethink what is now lost, and ask how and why did it exactly happened. Acts that unfortunately are largely contained by the coffee table book’s formal limits. By intervening in this suspension of the past in photos, may an imagining of more egalitarian alternatives begin.
References:
Lujan, N. (2016). The Life and Works of Pedro Casanave. The Journal of History, 62(1), 30-69.
Rice, M. (2014). Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines. University of Michigan Press.
Niedermeier, S. (2016). “If I were King” – Photographic artifacts and the construction of imperial masculinities in the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). In H. Meyer, S. Rau & K. Waldner (Ed.), SpaceTime of the Imperial (pp. 100-131). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418750-007
Isaac, A.P. (2006). American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America. University of Minnesota Press.
Scott, W. H. (1984). Prehispanic Source Materials for the study of Philippine History. New Day Publishers.
Choy, C. C. (2003). Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Duke University Press.
Rodriguez, R. M. (2010). Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World . University of Minnesota Press.
Lico, G. (2021a). Arkitekturang Pilipino: A History of Architecture and the Built Enviroonment in the Philippines, Volume One: Early History to American Colonial Era. Arc Lico International Services & College of Architecture University of the Philippines.
Lico, G. (2021b). Arkitekturang Pilipino: A History of Architecture and the Built Enviroonment in the Philippines, Volume Two: Post-colonial to Contemporary Era. Arc Lico International Services & College of Architecture University of the Philippines.
Constantino, R. (1966). The Miseducation of The Filipino. In The Filipinos in the Philippines and Other Essays. (pp.39-65). Malaya Books.
Jacob Laneria 