Geronimo Cristobal

Month: December 2025

  • Desde el cielo: Real Photo Postcards and the Counter-Archive of Alfonso Ongpin 

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    Geronimo Cristobal Art History, ulaf050, https://doi.org/10.1093/arthis/ulaf050 I’m pleased to share that my article Desde el cielo: Real Photo Postcards and the Counter-Archive of Alfonso Ongpin has been published in Art History (Oxford University Press). The article examines the work of Alfonso Ongpin (1885–1975), a Filipino photographer, art conservator, and collector active in early twentieth-century Manila. It…

  • On Walter Benjamin’s weak messianic power

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    In Walter Benjamin’s writing, “weak messianic power” (schwache messianische Kraft) names a fragile, non-sovereign capacity that belongs to the present to redeem the past—not by fulfilling history’s promises in a grand, theological sense, but by interrupting the dominant narrative of progress and rescuing suppressed or defeated moments from oblivion. The phrase appears most explicitly in…

  • Jacinto’s ‘Mutya’ in Liwanag at Dilim

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    Emilio Jacinto (Emilio Dizon Jacinto)—also known in the Katipunan as Pinkian and Dimas-Ilaw—wrote Liwanag at Dilim out of the same revolutionary world that made him, the “Brains of the Katipunan”. This is how Nicanor G. Tiongson’s sketches his life as a poet in the CCP Encyclopedia: Tondo-born essayist and poet (15 December 1875–6 April 1899)…

  • Baroque Churches in the Philippines

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    The development of the Baroque in the Philippines is most clearly observed in masonry churches, where European architectural forms were adapted to local materials, labor, and environmental conditions. The term “Baroque,” associated etymologically with the Portuguese barroco (irregular pearl), was later used by art historians to describe artistic production marked by dynamic composition and intensified…