Sunday, January 06, 2008 Celebration Cebu through pictures By Jenara Regis Newman
CEBU, Pride of Place is a coffee table book that celebrates the sights and, if one chooses to sense them, the sounds, the smells, the history, the beauty that is Cebu.
Published by Marissa N. Fernan, with photographs by master lensman E. Billy Mondoñedo, Cebu takes one on a journey of the place as captured by Mondoñedo’s camera: the people and their celebrations, the churches, the beaches and seascapes, the buildings and infrastructure of a booming modern metropolis and its old houses, the arts and crafts, the museums, the countryside. All speak of the different facets of life in Cebu as seen by someone who has grown to love the place.
Fernan, in her foreword, speaks of the book as a “journey.” Not really so much of a journey as a coming home, a place to come home to after journeying elsewhere, a place she grew up in and which she has, like her late father, Chief Justice Marcelo Fernan, grown to love. It is a book to fulfill her father’s and her own dream of coming up with a book on Cebu. And she has come up with a magnificent book worthy of a pride of place in one’s coffee table.
Mondoñedo speaks of taking pictures at the “moment” when everything falls into place: lights and shadows making for the perfect moment to photograph an object to come up with a picture worthy of the artist in the photographer.
All the photos in this book are really frame-able works of art.
The layout artist has also found the perfect picture for the cover: the lowly puso. Now that it’s on the cover of Cebu, it will never lowly anymore, restoring it to its place of honor as it was used in old Cebu. The puso or “hanging rice” as foreigners call them: it has become a ubiquitous food item for the workingman and the young in school who have to take their meals on a budget away from home, or for people who go on a picnic but its origins did not mean it to be common daily fare. In pre-Christian Cebu, it was an offering to the nature gods, its varying shapes connoting the seasons and reasons for the food offering. Which is why it’s perfect cover for Cebu, Pride of Place, an object of old Cebu reflecting the various aspects of the modern city that Cebu is today.
