Jason Reblando

"Partially Civilized": The Lens, the Gaze, and the Residue

More than any other medium, photography is able to express the values of the dominant social class and to interpret the events from that class’s point of view.

— Gisele Freund[1]

The camera lens is uniquely suited to align a photographic image with the power that it seeks to reinforce. As a photographer myself, I’m familiar with the dynamics of power that exist between the photographer, the subject, and the audience, and over the past several years, I’ve thought about this power as it relates to the photographic images that Americans made of the Philippines in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 

During those years, Dean Conant Worcester established himself as an authority on the Philippines. A zoologist by training, Worcester traveled to the Philippines on academic expeditions to study birds and plants. He was a zealous photographer and made thousands of photographs of people and places throughout in the Philippines, applying his zoological classification systems to the Filipinos he encountered. Many of Worcester’s images of Filipinos were a deliberate study in contrast between tall, white, fully clothed Americans and short, brown, naked and semi-naked Filipinos. He eventually became a colonial administrator for the US government in the Philippines, and depicted Filipinos as uncivilized in many of his images in order to justify the American presence in the Philippines. These images feature subjects who face the camera or stand in profile against a white background so that the subjects’ features can be studied like specimens. Worcester’s choices as a photographer were not unique—this forensic treatment of colonized people in Asia and elsewhere was part of a larger anthropological project in which photographers classified and categorized racial difference in order to dehumanize, surveil, and control the colonized subject.

More than any other medium, photography is able to express the values of the dominant social class. I can’t help but think of Freund’s insight every time I look at this photograph and others like it. I found this image while browsing the Peabody Museum archives. In it, a tall well-dressed American woman stands next to a Filipino boy in white pants and long-sleeved shirt. This is Maud Huntley Jenks, wife of Dr. Albert Jenks, University of Minnesota anthropologist and colleague of Worcester on the Second Philippine Commission. The woman and boy both stand on a white cloth backdrop. The woman’s hands are clasped together in front, and her long skirt reaches below her ankles to the ground. The boy stands with his arms at his side. His white suit looks pristine, and the pencil in his breast pocket suggests that he is already mastering the power of literacy and written expression, and he is barefoot. Mrs. Jenks looks directly into the camera with a facial expression that is relaxed and open, while the boy looks serious, concerned, gazing at something slightly outside of the frame. Is it the hat that inexplicably foregrounds the entire image, like a mysterious third subject? Or perhaps he is somehow gazing into the future, at the future words that would attempt to define him in this image. In the upper left of the backing board, “Bontoc IGOROT” identifies the ethnolinguistic group of the boy. Beneath the portrait, the caption written in cursive on the thin bottom border of the image reads: “8 a-349 Mrs. Jenks and a partially civilized boy.” The colonizer’s words are as revelatory as the images themselves.

In my collages, I feel compelled to disrupt the power dynamic between the photographer and subject to counteract the choices that colonial photographers made. By cutting, pasting, and rearranging various elements of archival images, I aim to critique the colonial gaze and reclaim the photographic narrative.

In this collage, I replace the boy with a collected sample of Cyathea, a fast-growing and delicate species of tree fern found throughout the Philippines. In doing so, I hope to suggest that the boy is not an anthropological category, but a human being who flourishes and grows and thus resists the narrative of the caption.

In 2015, I was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to the Philippines, where my goal was to explore various aspects of the Filipino diaspora and the effect that overseas labor takes on families back home. While working on this project, I found the residue of colonization everywhere in ordinary life, such as a boy wearing a scarf of the Philippine Scouts, a unit of the United States Army used to combat Filipino insurgents during the Philippine-American War; or roadside kilometer markers of the 106 kilometer Bataan Death March that American and Filipino soldiers marched under the threat of bayonets of the Japanese Imperial Army during the early months of US involvement in World War II. These casual but constant encounters fed my ongoing interest in the lingering economic and psychological effects of colonization, and in turn, inspired my work with these archival photographs.