Fig. 1. Stephanie Syjuco, Nationalities: Eleven Filipino women in native dress (from the American Counterpoint project, Alexander Alland, Sr., Photoprints, circa 1940, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, NMAH.AC.0204), 2021. Archival pigment inkjet print, 38 3/4 x 56 inches (98.4 x 142.2 cm). Image courtesy of the Artist.
My recent work focuses on the problematic construction of American history and how photography informs deeply biased structures foregrounding whiteness as a normative subject. Borrowing from the visual language of photography, anthropology, and museum archives, I examine how these disciplines go hand-in-hand with producing and proliferating images and documents of exclusion, generating a skewed collection that mirrors an American imagination built on white supremacy, ethnographic record, and cultural Othering. I do not make work about Filipino identity, I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.
Over the past four years I’ve used national archives and collections as visual source material for an investigation into the presence (or non-presence) of Filipinx Americans in these spaces. It’s a simple query: where are we, and what do we look like within these American archives? Where are we not? Where are we – accidentally? Where should we be? Searching through an archive’s documents and photographs to “find” evidence of one’s cultural lineage and existence, it becomes clear that the archive is not built for us — its American colonial subjects. And when the archive is about us, it shows a frightening lack of clarity. If we were to take these archives as extensions of the American imagination, then that imagination is full of blind spots, holes, and fragments. We are seen, posed, and framed on the margins.
For a project at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis in 2019, I spent weeks investigating archives at the Missouri Historical Society and the St. Louis Public Library in order to view the ethnographic photographs produced from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Heralded at the time as a marvel of American progress and abundance, the Fair also featured the notorious Philippine Village – a type of ethnographic “human zoo” that actively displayed over 1200 imported Filipinos in an unfaithful recreation of ritual and tribal spectacle. This functioned to “educate” the American public on their new colonial subjects, as the Philippines had become a US colony in 1898, and would remain under American rule for almost a half century. The overwhelming amount of demeaning and racist imagery produced just at the Fair circulated and became the most widely known representations of Filipinos in the American archive. These pictures are everywhere, and are not countered. They travel through time and keep on giving over a hundred years later.
Now picture this: Two brown-skinned hands come together to cover a small grainy black and white photograph in such a way to block out most of a scene. Around these hands we can make out parts of the people they are covering: a group of dark-skinned men in “tribal” costume, their bare legs and feet standing next to spears, as if posed for a picture. Their faces and identifying features, however, are covered by the hands — my hands—as if to keep them anonymous and protected from a public that had put them on display. It’s a curious re-photo that shows and doesn’t show at the same time. It withholds and denies, and attempts to frustrate the viewer in the act of looking. It’s one of many, many similar instances in which I physically used my hands to cover and edit the images of Filipinos put on display at the Fair. I sat in the archives and systematically intervened in their pictorial delivery system. The final work of covered photographs is called “Block Out the Sun,” and was my way of “talking back” to the dehumanization of this archive.
Not long after, I was deep in the Archives Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, having received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship to do a month of study, again looking for evidence of Filipinos in a national archive. Again, I wasn’t interested in a heritage study, where I would find cultural connection with my “identity”. I was attempting the opposite, which was to see how the empire sees “us”. Search after search turned up fragments, bits, and incomplete evidence, as if the only way we could make it in was through ethnographic photo, war document, or accidental inclusion. At one point I found so few records outside of these spheres that I started typing in peripheral terms like “Oriental” (yes, there is an archive folder labeled that) and misspelled versions of “Philippines” and “Filipino” into the search engines. Anything to get a different hit. As my frustrations grew, the field of searches grew, the search terms getting wilder and more abstract in order to find something.
The searches took me into the business records of the Duncan Yo-Yo Company, which weirdly enough had one of the largest collections of images of Filipinos, men who had been brought over in the 1920s and 30s as traveling salesmen to hawk yo-yos to the general public. In the Anthropology archives I found a labeled file of photographs of Filipino Tasaday tribespeople mixed in with a South American Amazonian tribe, which had somehow accidentally migrated in and become one and the same in the eyes of the archivists. There, I also found an image of Philippine National hero Jose Rizal labeled simply with the generic term “Man” and in handwriting on the side a quizzical “Philippines”? The hard truth was that the empire, despite owning us for half a century, still did not recognize us. The colonial legacy of the ethnographic image was still the primary lens, along with mislabeled files, untagged records, dead ends, and fragments. What do you do with erasure, disintegration, and obfuscation? How can we re envision, assert, and insert ourselves when left out of the original national narrative?
I’ll end with this image on screen. It’s my own artwork (bear with me, I’m an artist so I’m a bit obsessed with the things I’ve just worked on…). It shows a black and white photograph of a group of Filipina women in traditional dress, dancing and joyful. It’s one of the best images I could find in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that depicts us. It’s an anomaly, a blip, a beacon, a light. I was stunned when I found it, it was so different from all the other images of “us”. It sits in an archival storage box, and the caption for it explains its origin: “Nationalities: Eleven Filipino women in native dress (from the American Counterpoint project, Alexander Alland, Sr., Photoprints, circa 1940, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, NMAH.AC.0204.”
The lengthy title of this artwork places it within a specific index of an American archive. You can track it back. The call numbers show the image as being officially logged into a shelf of history, a moment where these women can be called forward to attest to their presence in a sea of non-representation. If we look closer at this image, we can see that it’s actually a picture of a taped-together picture – the original photograph by Alexander Alland Sr. sitting in a box on a table, was photographed by myself, and blown up and printed in pieces as low resolution laserjet prints, complete with cut edges and overhanging paper margins. These pieces were then literally Scotch-taped together into a giant poster, pinned to my studio wall, photographed yet again, and then finally printed as a high resolution large-scale archival print and framed. It’s a reproduction that has gone through multiple processes of reproduction, from low resolution to high resolution, from the belly of the archive, buried and forgotten in boxes and stacks, and then finally formatted as a new art object.
It has also recently been acquired by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, having migrated out of an archived box from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, originally as a work by Alland, a documentary photographer, and retold as an artwork by me, a Filipinx American speculating on her own place within a national narrative. I see this swapping of origins and histories as a form of regeneration, a nod to the legacy of Alexander Alland, a Ukrainian-born Jewish refugee whose life's work included documenting immigrant communities in America to counter rising xenophobia. His picture, reflecting us, brought me profound light, and I, in turn, bring to it light 80 years later through reproduction, compressing time and distance between us. Together we get to sit in solidarity as dual authors in a new spotlight — not hidden anymore in a dusty box, as it will be on display in the Smithsonian galleries sometime next year.
Just yesterday I did a search through the Smithsonian online database for the term “Filipino American” and I found myself in the archive through this new/old work, clearly labeled. It is Object Number 2022.24.1.
This text was written for a discussion on October 19, 2022 at Stanford University, outlining the Author's thinking behind her work on excavating American colonial archives. A version of it will be included in a forthcoming monograph "Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive". This article is republished with permission from the Author.
Comments