Mirrors in sepia
Archivists and librarians I meet abroad during my research are often fascinated by the useless information I share about their collections. For example, I once found myself in the reading room of the Minnesota Historical Society leafing through an album of photographs of the Philippines and Filipinos taken in the early 1900s. To the librarians, these were just another batch of black-and-white images until my local knowledge unlocked what was actually happening inside the frame. It was a clear, chilly spring day outside the library in St. Paul, yet it was undeniably hot and humid for the people inside the album.
I am naturally drawn to photographs of the Philippine-American War. History is sepia colored in my mind’s eye. Enemy uniforms in dark blue shirts and khaki pants, while the Filipino forces wear civilian attire, making them harder to catch when they retreat into barrios. Filipino officers, wore uniforms with fine blue stripes, known as rayadillo. Yet the photograph that made me stop and linger was not a battlefield scene, but a market, a palengke. Itinerant vendors, all women, squat or sit squarely on their heels. Looking at them made me wonder about ergonomics (where were the missing chairs and stools?) and sheer endurance (how long did they sit like this in the tropical heat?). The way their wares were laid out directly on the ground spoke to the temporary nature of their stalls. Stillness is caught in sepia, leaving out the noise, smells, and textures of an authentic palengke.
In the foreground are small dried fish displayed in two distinct ways: on the left, heaped (kumpol) on a round woven tray (bilao); on the right, neatly arranged on a mat are nine small piles (tumpok). These vendors did not hold postgraduate management degrees, yet they possessed an instinctive Filipino sense of order—something that, in everyday practice, could easily be studied at the Asian Institute of Management as a choreography of commerce whose nonverbal cues are understood by both seller and buyer. Behind the fish vendors stands a makeshift hut where gabi leaves and stems hang from a beam, tied (tali) together in bundles (bigkis). Filipino also distinguishes between a generic bunch of fruit (buwig) and a specific cluster of bananas (piling). On a low table, I made out a square wooden measuring scoop (takal)—the very kind I used to see boiled peanut sellers use along Edsa. It resembles the square wooden cup (masu) used for Japanese sake, that originated as a rice scoop holding one go, or roughly 180 milliliters. It is a pity that Manila peanut vendors today have replaced that wooden takal with a repurposed Nescafé glass or plastic cup.
What the camera cannot capture is the unseen choreography of Filipino commerce. Once goods are measured, weighed, and priced, the game begins. Buyers haggle—or in Taglish, “make tawad”—by shaving an amount off the asking price. Depending on mood or relationship, the seller obliges by rounding down and tossing in an extra piece or two (dagdag) to seal the deal. Repeat customers (suki) often receive a discount without even asking. A shopper might buy a whole piling of bananas, or opt to buy piecemeal (tingi), while high rollers can buy out the entire stock (pakyaw) for a steeper markdown. Still others get a break simply for being the first customer of the day (buena mano, literally “good hand”),which is believed to bring good luck until closing time—with male customers traditionally considered better buena mano than female ones. Even the vocabulary tells a layered history: buena mano echoes our Spanish colonial past, while suki and pakyaw hark back to Southern Chinese immigrants who spoke Hokkien.
Imagine a century-old photograph in a foreign archive leading me to explain habits I take completely for granted at home. To a Midwestern librarian accustomed to buying in bulk, the concept of tingi is odd, more so when I explain that in the Philippines, you can buy one or two cigarettes instead of a pack, or a single-use sachet of shampoo instead of a full bottle, showing how modern corporate commerce simply packaged our traditional tingi culture.
As I identify people, objects, and places in these albums, I notice librarians jotting down notes on scraps of paper. The “useless information” that my critics dismiss as mere trivia or antiquarianism is, in reality, living cultural memory the metadata foreign archives lack and need. They often marvel how I put names to faces or identify vanished Manila landmarks, like the Magallanes Monument along the Pasig River or the Intramuros churches destroyed during World War II.
I look at archival photographs for a living, yet I never treat them as an exercise in nostalgia, nor am I tempted to romanticize or artificially colorize the past. Instead, these images allow me to measure distances in time—helping me appreciate how much has changed since light first hit a glass negative, and how stubbornly certain habits survive into the digital age. Old photographs are not windows into a dead world; they are mirrors in which we can measure ourselves.
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