Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines by Mark Rice

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines by Mark Rice JPaul S. Manzanilla Mark Rice Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015. 270 pages. Before Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands was published, the only book-length study of American colonial photographs of the Philippines was Benito Vergara Jr.'s Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines (University of the Philippines Press, 1995). Vergara showed how the country was "visually possessed" by means of travel pictures and made to represent the colonial narrative of progress through the use of before-and-after images in official photography of the state. While Displaying Filipinos tackled official and travel photography of the early years of American rule, Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands focuses on a huge photographic collection of one of the most important personalities of US imperial rule: that of zoologist, ethnologist, public official, and entrepreneur Dean Conant Worcester. Worcester was an exceptional person of his time. He had visited the Philippines while it was still a Spanish territory, collecting specimens as part of a scientific expedition. When the question of the country's future was being debated and later on when it became a laboratory of colonial rule, he shared his knowledge with American officials, a knowledge he later fashioned as "expertise." Much of this expertise was derived from his prolific production—and strategic use—of photographs. Readers should note at the outset that not all photographs were taken by Worcester himself; the man, in fact, asserted authenticity of pictures from the "scientific and governmental credentials" of the photographers (42). "Establishing the Archive," the first chapter, leads us to the primary sources of the author's study. These voluminous documents are not innocent products of Worcester's documentary zeal; they are object lessons for understanding some of the prevailing technological, scientific, artistic, and political imperatives of the period. It is telling that Worcester did not submit to the camera's presumably truthful nature; he believed that it "can be made to tell the truth" (2), reminding us of the agency that lies outside the medium and debunking an idealist conception of truth as something [End Page 546] that only has to be told. He communicated the truth of and about his subjects—the Philippines and its people—through skillful utilization of the camera, its attendant photographic processes, and the subsequent ways and means of displaying the "objective" pictures to various peoples. His use of photographic technologies, developments of which he was so attentive to and which he maximized, buttressed the special knowledge of the Philippines that Worcester claimed. On this point, it is important to consider the epistemological implications of the ontological condition of photography, which here does not simply mean the physical snapshot but also the procedures of its production and most importantly the materiality of its exhibition, display, and circulation—indeed, its constitution as a "photography complex," according to historian James Hevia. The second chapter tackles what may be considered the most observable feature of Worcester's photographic subjects: the Filipinos' states of nakedness and nudity. Rice uses the descriptions "dressed" and "undressed" to highlight the "symbolic uses of clothing as markers of savagery and civilization" (48). Naked and partially covered bodies are dense images that reveal the photographer's dispositions to capture them and the eventual reader's prejudices in how to see them. We all know that they were not seen for "what they were," but according to certain assumptions of how human beings should appear and what "proper" citizens of a modern nation and state should look like. Because being photographed is being controlled, photographed bodies were posed according to the visual predilections of the photographer. The erotics of capture and display, the pedagogical mission to appraise Filipino natives as being closer to African Americans and even label some of them as the "missing link" to man's primate ancestor (52), and the close scrutiny of the human bodies and their parts to the point of scientific "exactitude" are practices that demonstrate that knowing the people of America's first colony entails subjugating others in the...