How does Einosuke Rudy Furuya love Baguio? Let us count the ways. A full-blooded Japanese born and raised in the highland city until his family was repatriated to Japan in 1945, Furuya, 75, still considers Baguio his true hometown. He has spent several decades away from it working as a commercial photographer in Yokohama.
For his solo picture show at The Gallery of SM City Baguio, he presents his affection for the place that continues to haunt his dreams. His subject for this second of his “Sense of Baguio” series is numbers. This is his unique way of doing a countdown toward Baguio’s centennial as a chartered city, to be formally marked on Sept. 1 this year.
In her introduction to the exhibition, curator Patricia Okubo Afable wrote: “Furuya brings us the fruits of three years of perambulations through Baguio, past familiar gateways, hidden portals and discreetly-announced welcomes. (His) work takes the pleasures and accomplishment you get from counting and amplifies them. While historians think ‘chronology’ and demagogues point to ‘progress,’ he playfully shrinks Baguio’s past one hundred years into images of numerals. In each house number, stamped label, or hand-lettered mark, Furuya collapses time and place. Then he captures for us, in the sign maker’s momentous claim to identity, our daily striving for privacy, for belonging, and for personal art.”
The numbers are a throwback to Furuya’s innate shyness. As a boy holding a camera at age 10, he was ashamed of taking pictures of people so his first subjects were still life of stones, flowers, grass, other facets and parts of nature that early pre-war Baguio had plenty of.
Furuya said in a message at the exhibit’s opening, “The unique numbers that I found in various corners of town are more than simple numbers. They stand for personalities in a city that is very close to my heart. For this Baguio boy, they represent kinsmen and friends in the land where I was born. I have returned here in quest for these numbers... It has been like seeking old friends to talk to and exchange feelings with.”
Shooting with natural light, he zeroes in on numbers not just attached to gates or doors of private homes and buildings but numbers on the saddle of a horse, most possibly at Wright Park. But the sense of Baguio-ness is ever present.
Furuya said, “As I’m growing older, the more I love Baguio. That’s how important a birthplace is. If I had been born in Mindanao or Manila, I wouldn’t think of Baguio so much. But Baguio is so beautiful and wonderful. It is quite different from before. However it changes, it is still my Baguio.”
“Keeping Count, Homing In,” Rudy Furuya’s exhibition of 120 photos celebrating the Baguio centennial, is still on at The Gallery, SM City Baguio, until June 14. The exhibit will move to the Bencab Museum on Asin Road during the month of September as the museum's offering for centennial month.
All photos by RUDY FURUYA
A shorter version of this article appears in the June 10, 2009, issue of Philippine Daily Inquirer, Northern Luzon Supplement.
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