By Chris Malinao
Emmanuel Barrion Inumerable, “Manny” to his friends, has come a long way in photography since he started in the mid-1960s in grade four, at age 12, when he inherited a Japanese Royal rangefinder camera from an uncle.
“Curious and interested, I had to learn fast about shutter speed and aperture, and all those things about picture taking,” he recalls, “I was also into filters but without much resources as a boy, I used my father’s discarded Ray-Ban shades and colored cellophanes as filters,” he added, revealing an inventive streak that would later serve him well as a contracting civil engineer.
His State Riggers, Inc. has been a successful company building stages for big concerts and political events since the Marcos years. Manny was the first to build stage platforms made of scaffoldings, quick to build and sturdy. When Cory Aquino became president, he was also called in to build the stage, his scaffoldings likewise making the historic transition. Name a big musical outdoor concert or big gathering that needed a stage, chances are it was made by State Riggers, Inc.
That rangefinder camera? He lost it to theft when he was in college, and for 10 years the photographer was without a camera. “I would just go to Camera World in Cubao and look at the Ricoh, Fujica, and Nikon cameras on the window displays there,” Manny reminisces.
When he started working and was able to afford a camera, he bought a Pentax M8 from a friend and joined Zone V camera club. This was the time when he immersed himself seriously in photography.
He would also repair his own cameras having been properly trained by a camera technician;he can replace the shutter cloth, for example, and do other fixes. This ability enabled him to rehabilitate old cameras that came his way and restore them in shape, if not in full function.After a while, he noticed that he had accumulated several old cameras. This was how his camera collections began and transformed their ancestral house in Taal, Batangas into a museum.
Galleria Taal in his hometown houses the biggest and rarest collection of vintage cameras in the Philippines. Manny has a total of 400 vintage cameras, with about 250 on display, all in perfect condition, all functioning and ready to shoot, if you can take them out of their glass cases.
Along with the large format cameras and other assorted collections, the museum’s star of the show is the 24-carat gold plated Nikon FA Gold, made by Nikon in commemoration of their winning the “Camera Grand Prix” prize in 1984. A shimmering, glistening eye candy, it comes housed in an elegant box of paulownia wood and very expensive. “No, I haven’t shot a single picture with it. It is still unused till today,” Manny confesses.
Don’t get him started on camera history, Manny is unstoppable. “It was not Louis Daguerre who invented the first camera, it was Joseph Nicephore Niepce in the year 1814,” he would point out.And he can talk passionately about the original Giroux Daguerreotype camera, “the holy grail of cameras,” as he describes the first commercially produced camera that he personally saw in Barcelona.
Manny is descended from the landed gentry in Taal, the Barrion-Ilagan clan on his mother’s side were original settlers of the town during the productive years of the Spanish era, growing sugar cane. His grandfather was Antonino Barrion, delegate to the 1935 Constitutional Convention. But the ravages of war and time can change things. The clan suffered, too. As a matter of fact, while Taal was spared from structural damage—it was not severely bombed during World War II—50 of Manny’s immediate relatives were killed by Japanese forces while hiding in a ravine in Maabod during evacuation. The bridge there is now known as the Barrion Bridge in honor of those killed.
Good thing the Ilagan mansion remained, and it is now Galleria Taal, the grandest camera museum in the Philippines. And Manny Inumerable is a self-made man, from his State Riggers, Inc.
As chairman of PhotoWorld Asia 2018 (his second stint as event chairman), he oversees preparations and directs activities for the two-pronged big event: the photography trade show at the Glorietta Ayala Malls on Feb. 1-6 and the international photographers’ conference at the Asian Institute of Management in Makati, Feb. 2-5.