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 focuses on his use of Real Photo Postcards (RPPCs) as a way of building a vernacular visual archive at a time when photography in the Philippines was largely shaped by American colonial and ethnographic frameworks.
Rather than producing images that classified Filipinos as racial or ethnological types, Ongpin’s postcards documented everyday urban life, social relations, and self-presentation. The article argues that these images functioned as a counter-archive, offering an alternative way of seeing Filipino subjects as historical and civic actors rather than objects of colonial knowledge.
By situating Ongpin’s postcards alongside decolonial theories and comparative examples from other colonised contexts, the article shows how photography could be used to assert visual sovereignty and nationalist imagination under empire.
Read the entire article here: https://doi.org/10.1093/arthis/ulaf050
Geronimo Cristobal 