Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, American colonial photographers cemented perceptions of the Philippines as an uncivilized and primitive society. United States colonial administrators of the Philippines created a visual narrative of White saviorism in order to justify American presence in the Philippines. In my project titled Field Notes, I engage with archival images made during the American colonial period of the Philippines and create collages that deconstruct and critique the colonial gaze. My project works against the representations that colonial photographers created. Field Notes transforms these archival images and supplants their power. As a Filipino-American photographer and artist, I am interested in offering a more nuanced and complex narrative of Philippine history and the history of photography itself. My collages use archival images sourced from repositories such as the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; and the Newberry Library in Chicago. These archives possess indelible images that codified colonial power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines. The cumulative effect of layering and reshaping images from these sources disrupts the reading of the original photograph. My project contributes to a growing conversation by contemporary artists who interrogate the colonizing power of the archive, not only for Filipinos, but for all people of the Global South. Field Notes considers vital questions about the intertwining roles of photography, empire, and the archive.
Presenters
Jason ReblandoAssistant Professor, Wonsook Kim School of Art, Illinois State University, Illinois, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Colonial Photography, Philippines, Collage, Archive
