Studio Portrait, Manila, Philippines

Itinerant Europeans produced the earliest photography from Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, permanent studios took hold after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 facilitated easier access to the region. In the 1870s, native “types” from the Philippines were produced for both colonial missions and a growing tourist industry. These images were sent back to Europe and the United States, where they appeared in international expositions or were reproduced as graphic illustrations in magazines. This "types" photograph stands out for the cultural hybridity presented by the two Filipino men. The man on the left dons a jacket, walking stick, and cigar, while the man on the right wears a loincloth and holds a traditional Filipino longbow. Both possess silk top hats. This image may have appeared dissonant to many nineteenth-century American and European viewers, who would have seen loincloths and top hats as symbolic of different kinds of racial and cultural identities. Even now, one may imagine that the top hats were props available to sitters in this unknown photographer’s studio, but another photograph in the Davis’s collection suggests that these are, in fact, the belongings of the two men pictured.