This collection of photographs and perspectives on aspects of Philippine social life dwells on the vision of an American soldier as well as on the interdisciplinary outlook of critics of representation and its ramifications. Harry Whitfield Harnish was stationed in the Philipines during the American imperialist occupation of the islands. Returning the look of the dominant gaze of exploration and surveilance unsettles the imagination of conquest as it redeems the possibility of a reciprocal and resistive exchange of sights in the present.

The life of the image, its makers, and the interpreters of its signs is the subject of this project, which is based on the digitally-restored transfers from vintage glass plate negatives. Probed are the issues of ethnicity, gender, race, built space and locality in essays that reconsider the presence of photography in the formation of culture and society in teh Philippines. The latter is taken as laboring under a regime that offered prospects of peace, government, civilazation, and nation at the same time that carried the taming of wilderness and its heathens, the subjection of bodies to an invasive census, and, surely, mass slaughter.

The technology of place making and the sensing of society are captured by the multiple lenses of seeing by a diverse spectrum of spectators and seers, visionaries, voyeurs, and viewers. This is perhaps why the specters of history flashing on surfaces do so much to captivate.