A travelling exhibit in celebration of Filipinas Heritage Library's 20 years founding anniversary
Role: Exhibitor, Creative Designer
Date: August 2016 - April 2018
Brief
COLOR IN HISTORY: FHL NOW 20 is a celebration of Filipinas Heritage Library's 20 years of sharing Philippine visual, aural, and printed stories, both on-site and online, along the observant of Philippine History Month. The exhibit provides a sampling of the Library's photographic, book, and music collections.
The color panels include colorized photographs by yours truly, which represent major categories of our collections: Indigenous Peoples, Presidential Papers, World War II, The Modern Nation, and Philippine Vistas. Also in the exhibit is the Filipino color-words from the research done by Filipino scholar Felice Sta Maria - translated in to ethnic designed patterns, color meanings in Philippine context, written and curated by Faye Cura, and colorized photographs from the Retrato Archive.
Color, like History, is a vast field of study.. there is enough to look at, a lot to read on, and some good ones to listen to. Such is color, and such is history - Faye Cura, Curator, Color in History
Research
The exhibit attempts to shed light on little known yet equally inspiring perceptions of the past (and present). These facets of history make up a web of information so prolific that many narrativescan be gleaned from picking out just one thread from that web. The possibilities ofmeaning are truly endless, so that even the manner of selecting a strand of data can bean account in itself.
Such is what happened in this exhibit, where we did a semantic search of our catalogusing random keywords — in this case, COLOR and its common nomenclature. The result are books and songs whose titles reflect or reveal associations that we in the Philippines have with something so ordinary and everywhere present. Photographic details hit her to hidden in black-and-white hues are also exposed with color. Likewise, a list of ancient color terms discloses not only our ancestors’ experiences, but their world views.
Color, like History, is a vast field of study and we do not aspire to cover what is beyondthe purview of the library. Whatever meanings we derive from the objects in the exhibitare defined by the constraints of our collections. Color spectra and terminology differfrom culture to culture; culture dictates what colors are recognized by a group. Andculture is history. While color is perceived based on the play of light on things, collectedhistory can reveal how and why (it is) these colors (that) are seen.
Process
The absence of color in photographs gives a lot of information on the subject — at the very least, the period when the photograph might have been taken. Just browsing through FHL's 35,000-strong Retrato collection, we know that mostly recorded without color. Meanwhile, shots from the late 1960s onward reflect the color.
Some might argue that photo colorization poses the danger of spreading “false” images ofhistory since the images are manipulated. However, image alteration is as old as the artof photography and image making in general. Even the act of shooting a picture,choosing what to include in the frame or how much light is allowed through the camera,is an orchestration. There is no such thing as a truly “authentic,” unfiltered image.
Photographs interpret reality rather than capture it. Much of historical work involves interpretation. Like all art and like all historical documents, photographs are just oneway of viewing and (re)telling history. What colorized photos do, in turn, is to make seemingly old, strange scenes familiar to present viewers so that, in the end, their interest in the past is sparked. More than “distorting” history, contemporary renderingslike colorized photos contribute to the discussion of history and, through careful research,to its practice.
Color Panels
Armed with long hours in front of my desk, I put effort on reinterpreting the original black-and-white images with digital color. The color panels include colorized photographs which represent major categories of our collections: Indigenous Peoples, Presidential Papers, World War II, The Modern Nation, and Philippine Vistas, divided into 6 colors: Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, Purple and Brown.
So along with the FHL Team, we identified black-and-white photographs from the Library's RETRATO collection. Each of the photographs should represent major categories of the Library's archives. As for Black and White, we displayed actual color photographs that come up when you searchfor these words in the OPAC. Interestingly, “white” brings forth a lot of pictures of paradisiacal white sand, while “black” yields pictures of dark-skinned saints.
So there it was, a full-fledged section of color and images.
Color Words
To explore the fascinating interplay between nature, color, and culture, we drew inspiration from the extensive work of Philippine scholar Felice Prudente Sta. Maria. Her research on Philippine color words involved meticulously scouring old dictionaries as part of her study on food. Collaborating with exhibit curator Faye Cure, we reached out to Sta. Maria for her compilation and crafted dictionary-like entries for 40 color words, along with their synonyms. These words were sourced from various dictionaries representing languages such as Igorot-Kankanay, Tagalog, Bikol, Bisaya, Maranao, and Iloko.
Yet, we acknowledge that this list is only as comprehensive as the dictionaries available, leaving us to wonder what other color expressions remain undocumented—words inspired by the hues of specific flowers (sinabilao), birds (quinolasisi), or the shifting colors of the sky at dawn and dusk (dáge).
This section of the exhibit called Color Words, presents the 40 sampling words from curated selection of the 100 or so words identified during Sta. Maria’s research. Each word is accompanied by an illustrative pattern drawn from indigenous designs, as documented in references like Philippine Ethnic Patterns: A Design Sourcebook (Peralta, 2006). The visual representations aim to reflect the local character of each cultural group, while the colors themselves were derived from photographic images of objects described in the original definitions. Through this approach, we sought to create a visually engaging and culturally resonant interpretation of these rich linguistic and artistic traditions
Traveling Exhibition and Products
Since its inauguration in 2016, the exhibit was brought to various universities, as such De La Salle University - Dasmarinas as part ofthe Museums and Galleries Month celebration (October 2016), and De La Salle Santiago Zobel School for History Month (August 2017), De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde (2018) and University of the Philippines - Los Banos, Laguna as part of the TED X UPLB event (2018).
De La Salle University - Dasmarinas
De La Salle Santiago Zobel
De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde
Thus, the exhibit impact went beyond the gallery walls as it was translated into a 100 page catalogue capturing the exhibit photos and description, along with the Color Words Cards with its 44 color cards which, along with the intellectual minds of the museum peeps, we devised the cards in a way that it can be played with 3 Filipino-inspired games to make it fun and interactive especially for the young audience. In addition, we also issued Colorized Photo Note cards of 5 exhibit photos and magazine articles as part of the whole exhibit souvenir. These products are still on sale at the Ayala Museum shop.
Learnings
I began doing photo colorization in 2015, with some personal photos of my Mom. From then on, I had this eagerness to introduce this creative process as a small community of digital artists doing photo colorization, where black-and-white photographs are colorized using image-editing software. In searching for materials to work on, I inevitably found the “treasure trove” of old images from the Retrato collection of the Library. As I walked pass the busy strip of Makati, I often wondered if an exhibition of colorized photographs can be installed in Ayala Museum one day. Lo and behold, after a random visit in the Library, I got an email inviting me for a meeting. And the rest is literally "History".
Nowadays, when we talk about history, we usually imagine it in sepia or monochromatic colors. But I realized that there’s more color in our history than we may be aware of. And what was initially for nostalgic reasons, grew in me; that in my own little way, I’m doing something worthy for the country. My curiosity for these moments and love for my country led me to creating a project called “Philippine History in Color”, and to date, it steered me in creating my first exhibit in Ayala Museum.
The main reason behind colorization is not to distort an image or alter the photos or any historical facts. Rather, to further promote the values and lessons of our past; re-introduce and share it to the new generation of audience. We can never replace the value of the oldblack and white photos, there is depth in it. It expresses soul, especially when it tells about a personal story, and more so, our past. It is arecord of someone’s personal experience. And because it is such, I put as much time and effort on research more than the creative work. It is not the intention of this whole exhibit to mislead the audience nor give them the wrong information. Yes! The colors are my own interpretation of the shades. But again, the goal is not just to put colors into photos, but to rediscover, to relive,and to see our history in a more vibrant perspective.
