Sala Mayor

‘Bringing a house to life through observation, familiarity, memory, or excavation can be a vital part of narrating the life of an individual, a family, or a group: life-writing as housework. A house can embody a person’s childhood, the story of a marriage, an inherited way of life, or a national history. The constructing of a house can be the fulcrum of dreams, ambitions, illusions, and pretensions. How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people…’[1]

 This photography series is an edit from a book project, Houses that Sugar Built: An Intimate Portrait of Philippine Ancestral Homes. My colleague, Gina Consing McAdam, and I were granted access to photograph these historic mansions and speak to their owners and custodians – many of which have not been photographed or seen by the public.

 I largely set about photographing the houses against a spoken ‘backdrop’ of Gina’s interviews or sometimes in complete silence. The ‘Sala Mayor’ (main living room) typically showcases the character of the architecture and lifestyle of the people which my photographs aim to capture; at the same time, leaving room for the onlooker’s own interpretation of these unique residences.

 I was similarly intrigued to meet the people behind the architecture, and often surprised at the diversity of the present-day custodians. Ultimately, however, they all had something important in common: a love for their family and their ancestral house, and a sense of pride and curatorship over their heritage and family legacies. Losing the family home would have led to a deep sense of loss…and a sense of dislocation from the past.

 Largely unknown outside the Philippines, these houses were built by sugar plantation owners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Iloilo, Negros Occidental and Pampanga, the main sugar-producing provinces. In their heyday, they were alive with family life and entertainment. Although largely remaining in the family, many are no longer homes but are being resurrected and reimagined sensitively in the form of a museum, open house, gallery, restaurant and boutique accommodation. On doing this, the custodians have made sure that the ‘big house’ has retained, indeed secured its place as an architectural icon and a powerful symbol of sugar’s glory days, with the foundations laid by their grandparents or great grandparents still intact.

[1] Lives of Houses, edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee. This selection is from the Preface, written by Hermione Lee.