"What a delightful window this is to a vanised world of the Spanish Philippines on the eve of its revoulutionary overthrow. The pioneer photographer marries his skills to an extraordinary narrative more precious than the photos themselves. For Laureano, one photo becomes the pretext for an extraordinary jumble of ideas and information, sometimes lyrical praise of a rural idyll, more often a catalogue of useful information, reading almost like a dictionary of vernacular terms. He offers us a foretaste of what the ethnographic film would seek to do at a much later stage, to capture the quotiian reality of a particular time and place through the images and a flood of information. Noelle Rodriguez is to be congratulted for making available to a later generation this forgotten gem of amateur ethnography."
-- Anthony Reid
Asia Research Institute
National University of Singapore

"Because ethnographic photography aspires to portray the everday life of an exotic locale, it inevitably betrays both familiar habits and uncommon imaginations. Felix Laureano's album of photographs of Philippine scenes does not elude this tension. In its earnestness to record, it reveals a keen eye for detail of custom and native instinct. In its need to comment, it discloses prejudice. Thus, there is actually as much distance in this depiction of intimate life as there is the yearning for a conversation, the reason that it is poignant....In the end, the prosaic of violence of surveilance becomes an evocative gesture...Laureano offers anecdote, memoir and fiction through the device of photography ...,conceiving a world and its "signs taken for wonders."
-- Patrick D Flores
Professor, University of the Philippines
Curator, Arts Division, Nation Museum of the Philippines - from Amzon 

Bk 1767, copy no. 2 call no.
Bk 1880, copy no. 3 call no.