High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The pioneers of photography in the Philippines were Western photographers, mostly from Europe. The practice of taking photographs and the opening of the first photo studios in Spanish Philippines, from the 1840s to the 1890s, were driven by the following reasons: photographs were used as a medium of news and information about the colony, as a tool for tourism, as an instrument for anthropology, as a means for asserting social status, as an implement for historical documentation, as a device for communication, as materials for propaganda, and as a source of ideas for illustrations and engravings. The practice of photography in the Philippines was not without the influence and influx of Western-art concepts into the colonized archipelago.