Many white people have felt entitled to the Philippines. Besides the Spanish, who have never felt bashful about breaking out their patented brand of colonialism, the United States at one point in time felt that the Philippines was crying out for some good ol’ American civilizing. At least 100,000 Filipino deaths, several concentration camps (no one much likes to talk about this), and a couple of embarrassingly brutal military campaigns later, America finally left the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898. Characteristically, we never looked back. There was money to be made, after all, wars to be fought, history to make.

I’m not kidding myself into thinking that I’m ripping the lid off some great historical cover-up that only I (and, I guess, the other kids in my twelfth grade history class) know about. America’s experience in the Philippines is no less shameful or blunderingly brutal than our tours of duty in Cuba, Panama, Vietnam, wherever. The ones that took place before television are buried more easily, sure, but the facts are still there. Just because this nation hasn’t looked back doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there to see.

Marissa ROth Marissa Roth’s "Boy with Dove" is on exhibit in Montgomery Gallery

In her photography exhibit that has its public opening at Montgomery Gallery this Saturday, Marissa Roth brings the Philippines, almost one hundred years after America stopped looking, to searing life. The exhibit is called "Burning Heart," a title it shares with a book of Roth’s photos and Jessica Hagedorn’s poetry. Both artists were at the gallery last Friday for the five-college opening of the show.

They were joined by about a dozen other people, most of whom were professor types (by which I mean professors, pretty much). But if most of the artistically-minded youth of the Claremont colleges failed to represent, it just made my job as a journalist that much easier.

First off, I got to get my journalistic eat on: free food and free wine, not in boxes, mind you, but in very large bottles, were the order of the hour. Secondly, I actually got to meet Roth (we’re not related, if you were curious, or even if you weren’t curious), who was friendly, pretty, polite, and so outgoing ("Hi, I’m Marissa") as to evince some serious art-opening experience.

Roth’s smoothness isn’t surprising after a glimpse at her resume. Roth has been in the photography game, with great success, for some time: after doing her thing for the UCLA Daily Bruin (which, incidentally, is not the oldest school newspaper in Southern California), Roth would build a portfolio working for some very big names, among them Time and Newsweek magazines and the New York and Los Angeles Times. Which, you know, is all well and good; better than all of that, though, was the fact that Roth is an extremely good sport: the artist who captured the contradictions and ironies and random, quirky beauty of the Philippines is also the one who took the gallery photos that would have accompanied this article were it not for certain technical difficulties..

Which gets more impressive when you consider how very, very good the photographs in "Burning Heart" are. During her ten years in the Philippines, Roth amassed a body of work that ably conveys the complexities of a nation of more than thirty five million people on more than seven thousand islands. Hagedorn’s poems, some of which accompany the exhibit and many more of which appear in Burning Heart, are sometimes very good, but, to some degree, seem to miss the point through their very existence. The urgency of these photographs makes captions, even in the form of Hagedorn’s delicate literary portraits, unnecessary.

"I was captivated by the Philippines," Roth said, "I think that anyone who’s been there can appreciate the seduction." It is one of the major triumphs of the exhibit (and to a greater extent, of the more in-depth book) that the spirit of the nation about which Roth so clearly cares co-exists with the uncertainty, menace, and bitter ironies of life in the Philippines. To call the Philippines a "post-colonial nation" does both the country and Roth’s work a disservice: the point here is that, whatever the nation’s history, and whatever it’s current conditions, the sum of the Philippines’ myriad parts is greater than any label we might attach could signify.

This is not for a shortage of dramatic labels and facts. The Philippines is a nation of hard-to-believe truths: beyond the famously outlandish number of shoes owned by the wife of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos (Imelda Marcos’ collection was well into five digits, and I’m not counting flip-flops), other eye-poppers abound.

More than three-fourths of the nation’s population is under the age of 15. More than one million of those children can be found sleeping in the streets at any given time. A staggering majority of the nation is devoutly Catholic. The standard late capitalist stratifications of wealth (the top one percent owning a ridiculous majority, the rest holding a small minority, you know the drill) are true of Filipino society. Democracy is still the rule under President Joseph Estrada, but when Roth said that the recognition her work would receive in the Philippines "depended on who was president," she was "half joking... but only half."

While Roth’s photographs certainly show these realities, they are, thankfully, as concerned with the smaller realities of everyday life as they are with the more standard journalistic subjects of politicians and squalor. Roth shrinks from neither, but pushes beyond both. "Burning Heart" is intense, and deeply felt, but too complex to be merely bleak.

Many of these photos — a deserted shrine to Marcos modeled on Mt. Rushmore, the head and shoulders of a beatific Virgin Mary statue that is almost completely covered by the muddy aftermath of the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, "Boy and Dove," the striking cover photo of the book — can be described simply through stating what they are, and by adding that there is a bizarre beauty to them. The force of some, such as "Real Boy, Real Gun," which shows a four year-old boy idly pressing a revolver to his cheek as he looks over his shoulder, or a photo of a man hitting golf balls into Manila Bay, are probably beyond description (though the two are very different, each evokes a definite visceral emotion).

"Burning Heart" is a surprising experience, for reasons greater than America’s checkered history in the Philippines; the nation went on after us, after the Spanish, we simply ignored it. What’s more surprising, and more rewarding than the easy chastisement-through-shock to which some photojournalism reverts, is the calm, deeply personal vision of a nation quietly in flux that emerges through "Burning Heart." When asked why she chose to shoot in black-and-white, Roth’s response was that "it’s so easy to get lost in color." The Philippines portrayed in "Burning Heart" is not simplified through this stylistic choice: from Manila to a lonesome island cemetery, this is a complex world of innumerable grays. And Roth, who serves as both our guide and our eyes, never takes a wrong turn.