[Cultural History] Photography as Rape - Mojares

Photography as Rape Resil Mojares 1. The beginnings of photography in the Philippines are not entirely pleasant or glamorous. 2. True, part of the early impulse behind the introduction of photography in the country was fashionable portraiture, the memorialization of the images of the wealthy and the prominent. The earliest mention of photography in the Philippines occurs in 1841 when a Spanish official in Manila, Sinibaldo de Mas, began to photograph members of the local Spanish community to supplement his income. By the late1860s, several photo studios (salones de fotografia) had been established in Manila and a few provincial capitals, producing portraits of principales. 3. Many of these nineteenth-century portraits have survived this day. Men and women in European garb, solemn and grave, bodies in fixed repose, posed for Posterity. Photography was an embalmment of the living. The human object was dressed and made-up, bathed in hot, sulphurous lights, printed, washed with chemicals, and became an object, an artifact, that could be displayed, conveyed, preserved. 4. The wondrous thing was that this image, the “afterlife” of the subject, can be mechanically reproduced and circulated, evoking in the beholder, across time and space, the presence of the absent. Being photographed carried with it notions of self-conscious importance, the desire to be remembered and regarded with affection or admiration even by those yet unborn. One exercised lien on eternity. To be photographed was an act of self-presentation – of vanity, perhaps even a bit of blasphemy. 5. This is why we do not have old portraits except those of the rich and the influential (or those who think themselves to be so), whose virtue is vanity. 6. There is, however, another impulse behind the rise of early photography. This is what, today, we would call the impulse of science-and-tourism, the appetite to document stage “life-forms” in strange places – whether those forms be exotic flora and fauna or exotic humans. 7. The earliest known surviving photographs in the Philippines are stereoscopic photos of a Philippine tribal group, the Tinguian, taken about 1860 by an unknown French traveler. Many photographs of this kind have survived to this day, in museums, libraries, private collections, and printed publications. 8. These photographs are fairly stereotyped. Frontal shots of half-naked “natives” in situ, positioned and lined up before the white man’s camera like specimens on display. The human subjects are almost always anonymous except for their “genus” (Igorot, Nabaloi, Bisayan, or some other) and the photographic composition highlights what, for the man behind the camera, are the defining details: the nakedness, shortness of stature, swart skin, and primitive paraphernalia (beaten bark cloth covering the privies, blowgun, bow-and arrow). If the observer indulges in a bit of “scientific” commentary, he would note the “dullness” or “moroseness” of expression, signs as it were, of his subjects’ subhuman

condition. The dominant male eye inspecting the world is indicated by how bare-breasted women seem overrepresented in this photographic inventory. 9. There is an important difference between studio portraits of ilustrados and ethnographic photographs of “half-naked natives.” Within the limits of what was then fashionable, the ilustrados controlled their own self-representation. They “owned” their bodies. The Westerner’s “natives,” however, seem like victims of some insidious form of assault. Lined up before the camera’s eye, they have become mere objects of taxonomic interest. The camera has “stolen” their bodies. 10. One wonders by what persuasion of threat or enticement of trinkets this conquest of bodies was brought about. Perhaps, it was all innocent play, or perhaps it was something more sinister. The story is told of natives shying away from the strange, unwieldy contraption, this black box that stood on a tripod, believing it was the white man’s magic, with the power to steal one’s soul away. Perhaps we will never know. 11. We know, however, that this photographing of bodies was part of the colonizing enterprise. The Linnaean project of identifying, classifying, and documenting “other” life-forms was an integral part of the European desire to “know” (in terms scientific and carnal) what was exotic, inferior, and different. It was a form of rape and conquest. 12. This strange lust for “knowledge” is illustrated in a most remarkable book of Philippine photography, Daniel Folkmar’s Album of Philippine Types (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1904), which contains 160 photographs of 80 men, selected from 1,024 photos produced for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition in the United States. These are head shots (though the bigger unpublished collection also included 612 full length nude photos). The photographs were part of a “scientific” anthropometric study of racial types or subtypes, which used literally captive subjects, male prisoners of the Bilibid Prison in 1904. 13. The photographs are laboratory “mug shots” (full face, profile) of men classified according to their ethnic or provincial origin. Each plate is accompanied by a table of anthropometric measurements and observations – skin color, length and breadth of head, peculiarities of eyes, cheekbones, or nose. The viewer is invited to inspect these specimens, noting the brachycephalic (short-headed), platyrhinian (broad-nosed), or prognathic (projecting lower part of face), in a relentless classificatory system that reduces these anonymous men to the status of chloroformed insects or stuffed frogs. 14. This is fotografia brutal. Like rape, it carries little respect for that human subjectivity that makes the person what a person is. 15. The irony behind this type of “objective” photography is that – for all its pretension at precision – it falsifies. Here, we may have the answer to the question I raised earlier. Why do “natives,” in the early ethnographic photographs, look (as in mug shots in a police station) uniformly “dull, morose, impassive”? It is a refusal to reveal themselves. What the observer saw to be “the characteristics of a “sullen and lowly race” may, in fact, be a form of resistance. They have turned to the camera’s eye a mask, and it not the “soul” that the camera will take away but a mask.

16. Consider another book of photographs, E. Masferre: People of the Philippine Cordillera, Phoographs 1934-1956 (Makati: Devcon I.P., 1988). These photographs – of the Ifugao, Bontoc, or Kankanay at play, work, or in repose – are of a different order. The portraits create for us the illusion that we are seeing the human subjects “as they are” – pensive, happy, playful, proud, autonomous, and individual. Eduardo Masferre – half-Spanish, half Kankanay, who lived in the Cordillera for decades – was an artist with an affectionate eye for his subjects. Even as his idealized, romantic framing of a “vanishing culture” is itself a form of mystification, he is able to capture fugitive qualities of his subjects that the early photographers could not. 17. Photographs capture bodies. With heart or skill, or both, they can capture traces of the soul as well. There are real perils in both. Photography is a form of larceny. Transgressing boundaries (body and film, private and public, now and then, the camera’s eye and our own), photographs do not stand alone. They must, in the end, be viewed in light of the moral narratives into which they are inscribed. 18. Like all forms of art, photography must be judged according to what it takes away, and what it gives back.