If the camera was an invaluable weapon in the military conquest of

the Philippines after 1898, photography also helped Americans

make sense of their new colonial subjects in Southeast Asia in the
years after the war’s official end. During the early-20th century,
both photography and American political power underwent rapid
and dramatic change. Neither was entirely new; the rhetoric of
“manifest destiny” had pushed American settlers across the Pacific 1
 in the 19th century, and photographs had been around for decades.
But the years around 1898 brought a burst of political and visual
innovation as the camera came to be a standard visual tool both in
the United States and the Philippines. This unit tracks the
relationship between photography, anthropological knowledge, and
political power in the Philippines by exploring the photo collection
of one American colonial official.
Dean Worcester organized, catalogued, and annotated his photo
collection himself. This unit’s image gallery maintains the
organizational structure and categories that Worcester used, and
the essay reproduces Worcester’s own captions as a window into his
visual imagination.

The photographs in this unit, unless otherwise noted, are from the
Worcester Photographic Collection, courtesy of the
Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

DEAN WORCESTER'S WORLD

For most Americans in 1898, the Philippines was a new and distant place. The United
States concluded a brief war with Spain in August 1898, and the terms of the Treaty of
Paris, signed in December, granted the Philippines to the United States in exchange for
a $20 million payment to the Spanish Empire. Americans avidly sought to learn about
the “white man’s burden” that they had taken up across the Pacific. Representations of
what British poet Rudyard Kipling called America’s “new-caught sullen peoples”
circulated in the metropole, peddled with appealingly visual titles such as Fighting in the
Philippines: Authentic and Original Photographs (1899) or Our Islands and Their People
as Seen with Camera and Pencil (1899). One of the first books to reach American
readers was The Philippine Islands and Their People, published in September 1898 by
Dean C. Worcester, identified on the book’s title page as an Assistant Professor of
Zoology at the University of Michigan.

2
 Dean Conant Worcester, seated front and center, captioned this photograph:
“Our party and a group of Ilongote chiefs,” 1900.
Location: Dumabato, Isabela
[dw02d043] detail

Indeed, Worcester’s initial interests in the Philippines were biological, not political. Born
in rural Vermont in 1866, he first traveled to the Philippines in 1887 as a student
member of a University of Michigan bird-watching expedition led by his professor Joseph
Beal Steere. He returned in 1890 for another expedition in the company of Frank L.
Bourns, a fellow scientist and photographer. Not content to record the local bird life, the
two men traveled to the most remote regions of the islands, meeting hunters and
farmers, warriors and fishermen, all of them subjects for Worcester’s camera.

Dean Worcester’s rapid rise in 1898 from zoologist to colonial kingmaker was a mix of
expertise, happenstance, gumption, and connection. He was, in part, in the right place
at the right time: when the Spanish-American War began in April 1898, few Americans
had ever even been to the Philippines, let alone had any expertise about the place,
ornithological or otherwise. In the space of just a few weeks, Worcester turned his
letters home into a published book—one of the first to reach American readers, and
definitely the most lavishly illustrated.

One of Worcester’s readers may have been President William McKinley, who invited
Worcester to meet with him at the White House in December 1898. McKinley appointed
Worcester to the Philippine Commission, the first institution of civil government in the
country, from 1899 to 1901. Worcester went on to serve as secretary of the interior of
the Philippines from 1901 to 1913, and—with only a few interruptions for travel in the 3
United States—would spend the rest of his life in the Philippines. But it was those 14
years of colonial service that mattered most for Worcester, for the U.S. colonial
government, and for the ways that the state visualized the Philippine Islands and their
people.

Dean Worcester loved cameras. He had begun taking photographs as a young man, and
by the time he left for Manila on the Empress of Japan in January 1899, he was a
capable photographer who entertained himself aboard ship by taking group shots and
tinkering with his camera.

Worcester included himself (seated far left) in this group photograph with
“members of the first Philippine Commission and staff” while at sea in 1899.

Worcester’s caption: “Members of the first Philippine Commission

and staff on board the ‘Empress of Japan’,” 1899.
Location: Empress of Japan, Pacific Ocean
[dw59b003]

Within a few years, Worcester had amassed considerable power in the colonial
administration, incorporating into his portfolio as secretary of the interior responsibility
for a wide range of undertakings: health, forestry, public lands, agriculture, weather,
mining, government laboratories, and non-Christian tribes. As part of his official duties,
Worcester regularly traveled through the 7,000 islands of the Philippine archipelago and
met with some of the country’s 10 million inhabitants. On his investigations, he always
brought along his own camera or hired a photographic assistant. Worcester praised
4
Charles Martin, his favorite photographic assistant, for having “made a large series of
valuable negatives which afford a permanent photographic record of conditions at
present obtaining among many of the non-Christian tribes of the archipelago and of
their manners and customs.” [1]

Ilustrados: Worcester Documents Manila

Worcester’s headquarters were in the colonial government buildings in Manila, where he

interacted with a diverse, urbanized population, most of them Western in religion and
dress, some of them close collaborators with the new American regime, and only a few
of them captured by his camera. The so-called “ilustrados” (from the Spanish word for
enlightened) included Spaniards who had traveled to Asia as part of the colonial
government, as well as Spanish-speaking elites in the major cities, along with ethnic
Chinese merchants and laborers.

Most of the Filipinos Dean Worcester interacted with during his career as a
colonial official were urban, Spanish-speaking elites such as those seen above.
Worcester took relatively few photographs of these men and women known as
“ilustrados” (from the Spanish word for enlightened).

Worcester’s caption: “Don Pedro Sanz, his Visayan wife,

his sons-in-law, daughters, and grandchildren,” 1899.
Location: Manila, Manila
[dw48B003] detail

5
In addition to the non-Christian groups that fascinated Worcester, he also
photographed groups he labeled as “Spaniards” and “Spanish-German
Mestizos,” here six young women.

Worcester’s caption: “Group of six women; with the exception of

No. 1, all are Visayan-Spanish mestizas,” 1901.
Location: Dumaguete, Eastern Negros
[dw49A021]

6
 In the Philippines, Worcester encountered a substantial Chinese minority
population. But he appears to have spent very little time photographing the
ethnic Chinese or their neighborhoods.

Worcester’s caption:“A Chinaman carrying fruit on a pinga,” 1899.

Location: Manila, Manila
[dw59b003]

Images of urban, Westernized

Filipinos—like this vivacious young
actress from the northern Philippine
province of Abra—were rare in
Worcester’s collection, which focused
on the rural and tribal Filipinos of the
country’s more remote regions.

Worcester’s caption: “An Ilocano actress

laughing. Full length front view,” 1905.
Location: Bangued, Abra

[dw39b012] detail

7
Taken as a whole, the Worcester Collection does not evenly represent the ethnic
diversity and cultures of the Philippines in the early-20th century. By contrast, it clearly
reflects Worcester’s preoccupation with classifying the “primitive” racial types that he
encountered in the mountain highlands and distant islands. Despite his day-to-day
interactions with urban Filipinos, Worcester took the overwhelming majority of his
photographs in the most remote regions of the Philippines.

No one told Dean Worcester to collect these photographs, but the adventure of travel,
the technical challenge and excitement of camera work, and the documentary evidence
that it produced must have appealed to Worcester’s larger-than-life personality and
outsized physical presence. With the authority he held as head of the Philippine Bureau
of Science, Worcester set out to amass thousands of photographs of people and places
in America’s new colony. The Bureau of Science, which Cameron Forbes, another
American colonial official, described as “a great science library serving as a storehouse
of knowledge not only for the Philippines, but for much of the East,” took its camera
work seriously. As Forbes noted, “[i]f a photograph were needed, this bureau not only
took it, but filed it away so that it might be available in years to come.” [2]

Worcester’s motives were simultaneously scholarly and political. “Now that the
Philippine islands are definitely ours,” wrote anthropologist Daniel Brinton in 1899, “it
behooves us to give them that scientific investigation which alone can afford a true
guide to their proper management. … [A] thorough acquaintance with the diverse
inhabitants of the archipelago should be sought by everyone interested in its
development.” [3] Dean Worcester took up the challenge of documenting the diversity of
the Philippines, with the goal of both understanding the Filipino people and learning how
to govern them.

Worcester focused his attention on the most rural groups. “[T]here are probably no
regions in the world,” he later explained, “where … there dwell so large a number of
distinct peoples as are to be found in northern Luzon and in the interior of Mindanao.” [4]
A catalogue of his collection arranged by ethnic group shows a preponderance of images
taken among mountain-dwelling Igorots and Tingian Islanders, and relatively few
images taken of urban Ilocanos and Tagalogs.

Number of Photos by Social Group: 8

 Bagobos (3)
Batanes Islanders (12)
Benguet Igorots (97)
Bontoc Igorots (60)
Bukidnon (17)
Ifugaos (53)
Ilocanos (27)
Ilongotes (13)
Kalingas (46)
Lepanto Igorots (26)
Mangyans (17)
Manobos (20)
Moros (26)
Negritos (49)
Pampangans (2)
Pangasinanes (7)
Spaniards (15)
Spanish/German Mestizos (10)
Tagalogs (23)
Tagbanuas (15)
Tinguianes (83)
Tirurayes (1)
Visayans (12)
Zamboangueños (1)

Using Worcester’s photographs along with maps and documents, American officials
began to chart the new colony’s ethnic landscape. But their scholarly confusion showed
the impossibility of their undertaking; in 1900, Dean Worcester asserted that the
population of the Philippines included three “races” and 84 “tribes,” while three years
later the Philippine census counted 24 tribes—eight of them “civilized” and 16 of them
“wild.” [5] The world that Dean Worcester mapped was at least partly a landscape that
he himself had imagined.

9
 Map titled “Races and Tribes of the Philippines,” from Herbert W. Krieger,
Peoples of the Philippines (1942). Dean Worcester’s efforts to map the ethnic
landscape of the Philippines shaped American anthropological knowledge of the 10
 region for decades. In 1942, when the Smithsonian Institution published a series
titled War Background Studies, Herbert W. Krieger drew this map based on
Worcester’s earlier reports.

In a memoir written at the end of his career, Worcester reflected on his time with the
Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes.

At the outset we did not so much as know with certainty the names of the
several wild and savage tribes. … As I was unable to obtain reliable
information concerning them on which to base legislation for their control
and uplifting, I proceeded to get such information for myself by visiting
their territory, much of which was quite unexplored. [6]

The spirit of adventure and exploration that had brought the young man to the
Philippines in the 1880s had become a technique of colonial governance. Worcester’s
fascination with the rural Philippines reflected his official role as head of the Bureau of
Non-Christian Tribes as well as the paternalism of empire and the romance of agrarian
lifestyles that he saw disappearing before the progress of Western civilization. When
comparing rural indigenous Philippine ethnic groups to urban Filipinos, Worcester noted
that:

[a]t present the pagan tribes consider themselves to be the ones who are
better off, and I am bound to say I believe they are right. [7]

Just as important as what Worcester and other colonial photographers saw through their
camera lenses is the question of how they looked through them in the first place.

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11
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL GAZE

Photography was a way of seeing the Philippines that emerged out of the political and
military needs of the U.S. colonial government. As such, it was part of a constellation of
governance techniques that included mapping, census taking, and cultural observation.

The photographs in the Worcester archive reflect the visual and cultural concerns of the
emerging social science of anthropology, a field that initially took as its subject the
study of so-called “primitive” societies. At the turn of the century, anthropology had
emerged as a professional field of study; scholars formed the American Anthropological
Association in 1902. But many of its practitioners were people like Dean Worcester,
amateur scholars who sought to document, analyze, and classify cultures in regions of
the world that were increasingly coming under colonial control.

Ethnography in the Philippines had begun in the 19th century as Spanish writer Pedro
Paterno and German Ferdinand Blumentritt traveled to the region. But these works were
almost completely unknown in the United States before 1898. In the Bureau of Science
and the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, founded in October 1901, Dean Worcester gave
ethnographic study an official home, charged to “conduct systematic investigations” [1].

Early ethnographers’ methods ranged from observation and interviews to archaeological

fieldwork, but in 1900 some of the most exciting new work in anthropology took
advantage of the portability and ease of use of the hand-held camera. Within a year of
its founding, the Bureau of Science had hired Charles Martin, Dean Worcester’s
photographic assistant, as the first civilian “government photographer” in the
Philippines.

Many of the images in the Worcester archive reflect a way of looking that is specific to
visual anthropology. How does a photographer look at his subjects when trying to
document a “race” or “tribe”? When an anthropologist looks through the camera lens,
what does he or she see? The anthropological gaze is first and foremost an act of
looking. Whether the photograph taken is a formally posed portrait or an instantaneous
snapshot, the photographer looks at his or her subject with a direct and intense gaze
that would generally be deemed impolite if no camera stood between them. The
distance between them makes the photographic subject into the other—the thing that is
to be photographed—but a necessary intimacy remains in the personal relationship
between the photographer and his or her subject.

12
 “Yardstick” Photos
Dean Worcester does not appear to have engaged in the formal
anthropometric measurement that many professional
ethnographers used. Instead, Worcester and his fellow
photographers used juxtaposition in their photographs in order to
convey size, and sometimes even used their own bodies as
yardsticks. Such depictions of scale can be found throughout the
Worcester archive.

Photographs of Dean Worcester and, in the bottom two photos,

Governor William F. Pack of Benguet Province, posed next to
Filipinos as an ad-hoc yardstick measure meant, as his notes
indicated, “to show relative size.” The images compared Pack and
Worcester, relatively tall men, with Filipinos of the Negrito
tribe—among the shorter people in the Philippines—making for a
sharp contrast.

13
14
 top left: top right:
Worcester caption: Worcester caption:
“Negrito man, type 1, and myself, to show “Negrito [wo]man, type 12, and myself
relative size,” 1901. showing relative size,” 1901.
Location: Mariveles, Bataan Location: Mariveles, Bataan
[dw001A002] [dw01A041]

middle left: middle right:

Worcester caption: Worcester caption:
“Negrito man, type 3, and myself, showing “Negrito woman, type 5, and myself, showing
relative size. Full length front view,” 1900. relative size. Full length front view,” 1900.
Location: Dolores, Pampanga Location: Dolores, Pampanga
[dw01H003] [dw01H010]

bottom left: bottom right:

Worcester caption: Worcester caption:
“Two Negrito men with Governor Pack. “Two Negrito men with Governor Pack.
Full length front view, standing,” 1909. Full length front view, standing,” 1909.
Location: Palanan, Isabela, Cagayan Location: Palanan, Isabela, Cagayan
[dw01Z002] [dw01Z003]

Objects and Objectification

Turn-of-the-century anthropologists did not merely scrutinize, but also sought to

document and to collect, another impulse that would have come as second nature to
Dean Worcester. As a trained ornithologist, Worcester was familiar with the imperatives
of collection, classification, and cataloguing. He had done that on his initial voyage to
the Philippines as an undergraduate birdwatcher, and he continued it after his gaze
turned from Filipino birds to Filipino people.

To see Filipinos as specimens for scientific study, Worcester had to turn human societies
into laboratories.

15
 These images from Dean Worcester’s collection convey his impulse to catalogue
and classify the Philippine culture around him, objectifying both people and
cultural artifacts in the process.
[dw07_grid]

In one image taken in 1901, Worcester posed a young woman and her child before a
white sheet draped to form a makeshift photo studio. Separated from her home, her
community, and even from the culture that her portrait was meant to represent, the
woman becomes an object of scientific scrutiny.

While Worcester and his team used a cloth backdrop in many photographs, many
images feature subjects in natural environments. The varying degrees of posed and
spontaneous scenes suggest additional complexities in the relationship between
observer and observed.

Worcester frequently 16
 photographed his subjects in
front of a hastily draped white
sheet. This common
photographic technique helped
him take clearly-focused
pictures, but also had the effect
of separating his subjects from
their cultures and communities.

Worcester’s caption: “Negrito

mother with child in her arms. Full
length side view,” 1901.
Location: Mariveles, Bataan

[dw01A098]

Here, by contrast, this mother

and child were photographed
without a backdrop.

Worcester’s caption: “Mangyan

woman, type 8, with child. Full
length front view, standing,” 1906.
Location: Lalauigan, Mindoro

[dw03I012] detail

17
 A white backdrop is apparent in this photo portraying Worcester’s colleagues
and Filipinos—“observers” and “observed.”

Worcester’s caption: “Three Negrito women with

Winthrop, LeRoy and Dr. Kneedler,” 1901.
Location: Mariveles, Bataan
[dw01A113] detail

Close observation of objects and objectification of individuals went hand in hand.

Approximately 35 images in the collection depict ornaments, some photographed as
details, as in this image of a hand with a “fresh tattoo.”

18
 Worcester’s caption: “Hand of Tinguiane woman showing fresh tattoo,” 1908.
Location: (Old Tauit) Burayutan, Apayao
[dw06HH002]

The striking appearance of the young woman within the photographic frame
belies Worcester’s effort to depict a disembodied image of bodily ornamentation.
19
 Many photographs in the Worcester collection document clothing, jewelry, and
headgear, or document “exotic” cultural practices.

Worcester’s caption: “Left arm of Manobo girl, type 5. Showing ornaments,” 1908.
Location: Bakua, Butuan
[dw13B010]

Photographs such as those in the Dean Worcester collection emerged from the practice
of anthropometry, the scientific definition of races by use of measurements of the
physical body. This effort drew on the latest techniques of criminology; indeed, the
mugshot had only emerged in European photography in 1883. For Worcester, and for
many of his readers back in the United States, such photographs were not only
scientifically sound, but on the technological cutting edge. For Worcester, who would
have been aware of the military and police uses of photography that were occurring in
this era, the blend of anthropology and criminology that these photographs represent
would have come as second nature.

Scholarly studies of the Philippines by turn-of-the-century anthropologists

included measurement of Filipinos’ bodies. Explicit (and usually unfavorable)
comparison with European bodies confirmed white Americans’ sense of racial
superiority.

Pages from Daniel G. Brinton, “The Peoples of the Philippines,”

American Anthropologist 11 (October 1898): p. 300, p. 303.
[1898_AmAnthopologist_p300_p303]

20
 Anthropology Meets the Mugshot
Observing Filipinos could also include measuring and documenting
their bodies, as with the images of these members of the Kalinga
tribe. Worcester frequently photographed his subjects seated in
front and side views to document their clothing, jewelry, and
hairstyles, but also to depict facial features that scholars would
have used to classify them into races. Part of the developing science
of anthropology, this photographic practice shared much with the
criminal mugshots that were also common in this era.

21
22
 Top pair to bottom pair:
Worcester’s caption: “Kalinga man named Lauagan. This man followed us for three
days with a head axe, constantly sneaking behind us and undoubtedly seeking an
opportunity to kill us,” January 1905.
Location: Bunuan
[dw05a007] [dw05a008]

Kalinga man named Saking, January 1905.

Location: Bunuan
[dw05a005] [dw05a006]

Kalinga woman, August 1901, Island/Region: Cagayan

Location: near Tuguegarao
[dw05e006] [dw05e007]

Staging the Primitive

Taxonomic organization of races, anthropometric measurement, painstaking

documentation of objects and cultural practices were all attempts by Dean Worcester to
stage his mastery of modern racial science. But the anthropological gaze could also look
at “primitive” peoples to evoke Western stories of colonial adventure and romance.

Worcester’s journeys brought him into close contact with rural Philippine tribes, and he
used his cameras to document the objects that he and other Americans found exotic
and intriguing. Examining these photographs of the “head-axe”—a weapon that was
typically used for hunting or harvesting but was sometimes used in the ritualized
warfare that Americans called “headhunting”—reveals some of the attraction that
violence and danger had for Worcester as he undertook his photographic work.

The Story of an Axe

Americans were fascinated by
the tool that they called the
“head-axe.” Generally used
for hunting or reaping crops,
the axe’s sharp blade could
also serve other purposes,
including ritualized warfare
that anthropologists described
as “headhunting.” In this
striking image of a young
Kalinga man holding a
head-axe, Worcester conveys a
sense of danger and violence.

Worcester’s caption: “Young

Kalinga warrior, type 3.
Holding head axe. Belonged
to party which attempted to
23
 ambush us,” 1905.
Location: Bontoc, Cagayan

[dw05b004] detail

Stories of colonial adventure highlighted Americans’ ability to interact with the

“primitive” peoples they met. Here, Worcester (seated on the left) and his
traveling party appear with a group of Kalingas in the northern Philippine
village of Pinakpook, but their head-axe is shown posing no threat to the
American explorer.

Worcester’s caption: “Our party at house of Doget,” 1905.

Location: Pinakpook, Cagayan

[dw05d027] detail

Here, a Kalinga elder

named Doget, Worcester’s
host in the village of
Pinakpook, poses for the
camera in battle dress. In
reality, most Filipinos 24
would have used this axe as
a tool, not a weapon.

Worcester’s caption:
“Kalinga man named
Doget,”
January 1905
Island/Region: Cagayan.
Location: Pinakpook

[dw05d001]

25
 Whether shown in the hands of a Filipino warrior or isolated against a
backdrop, images of the head-axe conveyed the romance and danger of
America’s colonial undertaking.

Worcester’s caption: “Three types of head axes in common use

among the Tinguianes of the Abulug River,” 1906.
Location: Bolo, Cagayan

[dw06ee013] detail

Eroticizing Native Women

In contrast to his photographs of axe-wielding male warriors, Worcester’s images of

women often feature an exoticism and danger of a different sort. For many American
men, travel in the Philippines prompted fantasies of escape from the dictates of
Victorian society. Worcester made several series of paired photographs of women that
juxtaposed them with and without blouses.

26
 Top left: Top right:
Worcester’s caption: Worcester’s caption:
“Three girls from Kapangan, types “Three girls from Kapangan,” 1907.
5, 6, and 7. Full length front views,” 1907. Location: Trinidad, Benguet
Location: Trinidad, Benguet [dw10L011]

[dw10L012]
Above right:
Above left: Worcester’s caption:
Worcester’s caption: “Kalinga woman, type 11.
“Kalinga woman,” 1901. Full length front view,” 1901.
Location: near Ilagan, Isabela Location: near Ilagan, Isabela
[dw05F030] [dw05f031]

In this series of images of women by a stream, Worcester seeks to convey an erotically

primitive state reminiscent of the innocence of the “Garden of Eden.” But the images of
these Gauguin-like nudes are highly artificial stagings on Worcester’s part; note the
woman’s clothing at her feet in the upper left photograph.

27
 Upper Left: Upper Right:
Worcester's caption: “Benguet Igorot girl, Worcester's caption: “Igorot woman,
type 19. Full length front view, reclining type 23. Reclining near stream,” 1904.
near stream,” 1904. Location: Baguio, Benguet
Location: Baguio, Benguet [dw10A181]

[dw10A071]
Lower Right:
Lower Left: Worcester's caption: “Benguet Igorot
Worcester's caption: “Benguet Igorot women, types 18 and 19 in bath,
women, types 18 and 19. Squatting on nude,” 1904.
bank of stream,” 1904. Location: Baguio, Benguet
Location: Baguio, Benguet [dw10A087]

[dw10A082]

We know little about how these images came to be staged or who was meant to see
them, but it is clear here that Worcester’s gaze had jumped from the documentary
impulse of the scientific photographer to the narrative imagination of the storyteller,
even as the unequal power relations of colonialism made these images possible.

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28
29
 Worcester’s caption: “Bontoc Igorots in automobile,” 1904. Location: Manila
[dw08A112] detail

COLONIAL COUNTERPOINT

The American colonial experience in the Philippines was full of contradictions, as officials
sought simultaneously to control the Filipinos and to engage and uplift them. Dean
Worcester cast himself as the nation’s leading expert on the Philippines, and took plenty
of credit for that work: “not one single measure for their betterment has ever been
proposed by anyone but myself,” he insisted in a letter to Secretary of War William
Howard Taft in 1908. [1] Dean Worcester’s mixed motives appear in his photographic
collection, which combined romance and condescension. Worcester’s official job as head
of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes was to defend indigenous Filipinos; he found
himself committed to changing Filipinos’ ways of life even as he wished them to stay
frozen in time. Ultimately, the only way he could imagine to protect them was to put
them—and their culture—into a museum.

30
In addition to taking photographic images, Worcester and his colleagues also
recorded Filipino voices. But visual accounts of Filipinos using Western
technologies—as in this image of a phonograph—often suggested the cultural
inferiority of Filipinos.

Worcester’s caption: “Making a phonograph record. Group of Lubuagan men

singing,” 1908. Location: Lubuagan, Bontoc
[dw008F021] detail

31
 Depictions of rural Filipinos encountering American colonial officials often
showed Filipinos awed by western technology, juxtaposing two ways of life, one
marked as advanced, the other as backward.

Book illustration and caption: “Entertaining the Kalingas. They are listening with
great interest to the reproduction of a speech which one of their chiefs has just made
into the receiving horn of a dictaphone.” from Dean C. Worcester, The Philippines Past
and Present (New York: Macmillan, 1914), vol. 1, p. 464.
[PPP_v1_dictaphone]

Through institutions such as schools, churches, workshops, and military training camps,
American colonial officials sought to transform Filipinos. The institutions that aimed at
uplifting Filipinos taught them not about their own culture, but that of the Americans:
teaching English rather than Philippine languages, celebrating the Fourth of July rather
than the outlawed Philippine national holidays, and decorating classrooms with portraits
of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

32
 Colonial officials such as Dean Worcester boasted of the civilizing effect of
American education. American flags decorate this classroom in the northeastern
province of Isabela. Display of the Philippine flag had been outlawed a few years
earlier.

Worcester’s caption: “Group of Ilocano and Gad-Dane school boys, with their
American teachers,” 1905. Location: Echague, Isabela
[1898_AmAnthopologist_p300_p303]

The colonial military was among the most transformative institutions. Its two main
branches, the Philippine Scouts and Philippine Constabulary began as temporary military
expedients during the Philippine-American War, as American officers sought to suppress
the insurgency by recruiting men from some ethnic groups to fight as soldiers against
others. But in the years after the war, colonial officials touted the value of the Scouts
and the Constabulary as schools for citizenship. Frederick Chamberlin, an American
journalist, wrote that “[n]ext to baseball, many are inclined to believe that the
constabulary is the most active single civilizing agent in our administration.” [2]

33
 Images such as this pair of
photographs—in which a
Constabulary soldier is
photographed “in uniform”
and “without uniform”
—helped Worcester show the
transformation of tribal
Filipinos through military
service.

Far left: Worcester’s caption: “A

Bontoc Igorot Constabulary
soldier, without uniform.,” 1903.
Location: Bontoc, Bontoc

[dw08A055]

Left: Worcester’s caption: “A

Bontoc Igorot Constabulary
soldier in uniform.,” 1903.
Location: Bontoc, Bontoc

[dw08A054]

Worcester believed the

Philippine Constabulary was
both a civilizing influence and
a more cost-efficient way to
run an army. This chart, in
Worcester’s 1914 book The
Philippines Past and Present,
shows how the U.S. military
relied on Filipino soldiers’
local knowledge, and also
shows the discrepancy
between their low salaries and
those of the Americans.
[PPP_v1_constabulary_chart]

34
In the following series of three photographs, which Dean Worcester noted were
evidence of the transformation of “old school” Igorot warriors into “new school” soldiers.
He arranged photographs in specific ways to tell a story of colonial uplift.

35
 Worcester identified this 1903 series “Bontoc Igorot warriors of the old school
and new school.” Showing the men first in traditional dress with shields and
spears, and then in U.S. military uniforms, the series boasts of the elimination of
their traditional Filipino ways of life.
1903. Location: Bontoc
[dw08A051] [dw08A052] [dw08A053]

36
As his tenure as a colonial administrator continued, Worcester traveled to remote
regions of the Philippines on almost-yearly tours, but as he grew more comfortable in
his government offices in Manila, his travels were shorter, more ritualized, attended by
an ever-larger retinue of colonial officials, and restricted to ceremonial encounters with
tribal chiefs. The photographic record reveals these visits less as cultural exchanges and
close observations, but public spectacles. They were increasingly staged performances
of a way of life that was already disappearing.

Colonial officials went to great lengths to teach Filipinos Western athletic games,
such as this foot race with an American flag (on left) at the finish line. At the
same time, they suppressed Philippine popular sports.

Worcester’s caption: “Finish of the long distance run,” 1908.

Location: Quiangan, Nueva Vizcaya
[dw07A034] detail

37
 The traditions behind tribal cultures were suppressed, but the spectacle was not.
This image of war games in the southern Sulu archipelago shows how U.S.
officials such as Dean Worcester could look with approval on Filipino traditions,
but only when they were confined to ceremonial performances.

Worcester’s caption: “Jolo Moros fencing with shield

and wooden barong,” 1901. Location: Jolo, Sulu
[dw23D023] detail

Worcester went out of his way to document styles of dress. Even under Spanish rule,
rural Filipinos moved between traditional and Western styles of dress. Anthropologist
Albert Jenks noted that among the Tingian people, “[t]he men commonly wear only the
breech-cloth, though they usually possess trousers and shirts which may be worn on
festival occasions.” [3] Worcester noted in his diary that “most of the Igorrote headmen
had coats of white or blue or other color (frequently a khaki coat they had got off a
soldier) and some of them also wore trousers of remarkable patterns.” [4] Whether for
soldiers or schoolchildren, clothing was a powerful marker of progress toward
“civilization,” and the Dean Worcester collection documents the importance of clothing
in a narrative of colonial uplift.

38
 Paired images such as these sought to use clothing as markers of cultural
progress, favorably comparing “Sunday clothes” with “every-day clothes.” But
sometimes images told different stories than the narratives of civilization in their
captions. On closer examination, these men did not look very different in their
Sunday dress than their everyday clothes.

Worcester’s caption: “Group of Tagbanua men in their Sunday clothes,” 1905

Worcester’s caption: “Group of Tagbanua men in their every-day clothes.”
[dw04B003] detail [dw04B004] detail
39
During a 1909 tour of Bukidnon, a mountainous region in the southern island of
Mindanao, Worcester was greeted by women who had clearly donned their finest
clothing for the arrival of the colonial officer.

By 1909, Dean Worcester’s visits to provincial capitals were carefully

choreographed affairs. Women in the southern province of Bukidnon appear here
in Western dresses to greet Worcester and his traveling party, and to show off
their own mastery of the norms of Western cultural behavior.

Worcester’s caption: “Bukidnon women dancing in the street to welcome us,” 1909.
Location: Impalutao, Bukidnon
[dw11I006] detail

But the women of Bukidnon had clearly learned that civilization required putting away
their traditional clothes, even if they brought them out for special occasions “to show
that they had them.” If the anthropological gaze sought to turn a “primitive” society into
a laboratory in order to study it, sometimes it was too successful. Increasingly,
traditional indigenous Philippine cultures were being turned into a museum—displaying
clothes that people no longer wore.

40
 Even as Bukidnon women chose their clothes to please Worcester, they also knew
of his interest in traditional Philippine cultures. These women displayed an older
costume during his ceremonial visit, but did not wear it “lest they displease” the
Americans.

Worcester’s caption: “One of the dummies at the foot of the arch shown in 11j003. The
people were afraid to wear these clothes lest they displease us,
but wanted to show that they had them,” 1909.
Location: Kalasungay, Bukidnon
[dw11J004] detail

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41
42
RECASTING “NATIVES”

Dean Worcester’s images of the Philippines circulated widely in the United States, from
the halls of Capitol Hill in Washington to the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 to the parlors
of middle-class Americans. As they circulated, the images changed—and even when
they didn’t, the changing contexts of their presentation told new stories about the
American colonial experience. Photographic images moved from the darkroom to the
printed pages of official state documents, most notably with the publication in 1905 of
the Census of the Philippine Islands. Here the surveillance powers of the state that had
been so crucial in pacifying the islands now joined with the documenting, collecting, and
classifying impulses of the anthropological gaze.

The Career of an Image

Tracing one photographic encounter as it moved from Dean
Worcester’s field work to its other public uses shows how the uneasy
but necessary intimacy of the colonial encounter was frequently
stripped away by the time images circulated back to the metropole
and were put to other political uses.

43
In this 1905 photograph, E. Y. Miller, an officer in the U.S. Army and the colonial
governor of the Palawan province, holds on his lap a Moro child. The boy was
the son of Datu Batarosa, a powerful local chief with whom Miller would have
worked on a regular basis.
Worcester’s caption: “Moro boy, type 1. Son of Datu Batarasa,
with Governor E. Y. Miller,” 1905. Location: Bona-Bona, Palawan

[dw23A003]

44
 A photo of the same boy with
other children in the background
creates a different impression.

Worcester’s caption: “Moro boy,

type 1. Son of Datu Batarasa. Full
length front view,” 1905
Location: Bona-Bona, Palawan

[dw23A001]

Miller drowned in 1910, and Worcester’s annual report as secretary of the

interior reproduced this image as its frontispiece, noting that the “provincial
service and the work for the non-Christian inhabitants of Palawan have suffered
45
 an irreparable loss.” Worcester’s image of Lieutenant Miller extended one man’s
benevolence to that of the entire American colonial undertaking.
Title page and frontispiece, Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior to the
Philippine Commission for the Fiscal Year Ended July 30, 1910 (Manila: Bureau of
Printing, 1910).

[Sec_Int_1910]

In November 1913, National

Geographic featured a
hand-colored version of the
photo. The caption focuses on the
Moros, describing them as
“treacherous and unreliable”
and stresses the need to bring
them under control.

By now, Captain Miller’s

photograph has begun to tell a
new story, much less personal,
more simplified, and far out of
Dean Worcester’s power to
control.

National Geographic caption: “A MORO BOY. The son of Dato Bata Rosa seated on
the knee of Captain E. G. Miller [sic], who lost his life while serving as Governor of
Palawan. The Moros are found in their greatest strength in the Island of Mindanao and
the Sulu Archipelago. They are unexcelled pirates and slave traders, treacherous and
unreliable to the last degree. The whole race numbers about 300,000, has never been
brought under complete control and its pacification presents one of the most difficult
problems before the Philippine government.”

[ng1189_1913_Nov_27]

Worcester as Storyteller

Like most colonial officials, Worcester returned regularly to the United States. By 1913,
he had hired a booking agent who arranged paid lectures across the country. During his
two-year tour, Worcester’s images reappeared as lantern slides (sometimes 46
hand-colored), projected in public auditoriums as a backdrop to Worcester’s own
booming voice that spoke with great authority about the colonial project. In December
1913 and January 1914, Worcester packed Carnegie Hall with a series of lectures on
such topics as “The Picturesque Philippines” and “Wild Tribes of the Philippines.” The
New York Times praised the lectures for including both photographs and films:

Each picture told a story of the marvelous progress made by Americans in

teaching civilization to the savage tribes of the Philippines…. The savage,
naked, dirty, and unkempt, was shown in still photographs, while that same
one-time savage, clothed, intelligent in appearance, and clean, later was
shown in moving pictures. [1]

Worcester’s visual extravaganza wowed not only the crowds at his lectures, but
government officials as well. One of the final stops on Dean Worcester’s U.S. speaking
tour was in Washington, D.C., where he appeared before the Senate Committee on the
Philippines. His testimony was both oral and visual: on December 30, 1914, he lectured
the senators for two hours in a darkened committee room illuminated by the glow of his
lantern slides.

Old / New

As the photographs that Dean Worcester and others took in the Philippines were
collected, sorted, and circulated throughout the United States, one style emerged as a
visual habit that shows the power of photography as its anthropological aims were put
to storytelling ends. Published works about the Philippines—by Dean Worcester or
others—regularly featured images of transformation, both of the Philippine landscape
and its inhabitants: a paved road replaces a meandering footpath; a modern
schoolhouse stands next to a thatch-roofed hut; a long-haired boy returns as a white-
suited man. The visual trope of sequential transformation was among the most popular
ways of depicting America’s colonial enterprise, appearing in books, magazines, and
even in official government reports.

Putting images in a sequence creates a narrative—with a beginning, a middle, and an

end. In an era that cherished progress, uplift, and evolution as keywords of civilization,
photographic sequences told persuasive stories to Americans about the nation’s new
imperial endeavors in the Philippines. Several can be found in Dean Worcester’s massive
account of U.S. colonial policy, The Philippines: Past and Present, published in 1914
(below).

47
 The caption of the frontispiece to Worcester’s 1914 book reads:
“The Metamorphosis of a Bontoc Igorot. Two photographs of a Pit-a-pit, a
Bontoc Igorot boy. The second was taken nine years after the first.”
48
 The text explains that the man became a doctor. By including the contrasting
images of a barefoot boy and a white-suited man as the first pictures in his book,
Dean Worcester presented images as evidence of the achievements of the colonial
project.

Title page and frontispiece, Dean C. Worcester,

The Philippines Past and Present (1914).
[1914_PhilPstPres_v2] [1914_PhilPstPres_v2_frontis]

Dean Worcester not only used

images to document personal
transformation, but also the
remaking of the Philippine
landscape. Roads, bridges,
trains, and farm equipment
appear in his photograph
collection as signs of
modernization.

captions:
top: “The Old Way of
Crossing a River.”

bottom: “The New Way of

Crossing a River.”

Dean C. Worcester,
The Philippines Past
and Present (1914).
[dw_ppp_v2_006]

49
 captions:
top: “Old-style Road across
Lowlands. Tracks of this sort
become completely impassable
during the rainy season.”

bottom: “New-style Road across

Lowlands. Roads like this are
passable at all times.”

Dean C. Worcester,
The Philippines Past
and Present (1914).
[dw_ppp_v2_004]

Bakidan
Bakidan was a Kalinga chief whom Worcester knew well from his
travels in the mountains of Luzon. Over time, however, as
Worcester published accounts of his time in the Philippines,
descriptions of his relationship to Bakidan changed from depictions
that highlighted close and personal relations to stories that erased
Bakidan’s individuality and highlighted his tribal and “savage”
identity.

50
 This photograph of
Bakidan, a Kalinga chief,
was taken in 1905 during
an extended stay by
Worcester in the village of
Bunuan in the northern
Philippines.

Worcester’s caption:
“Kalinga man named
Bakidan, type 1. Half length
front view,” 1905
Location: Bunuan, Cagayan

[dw23A001]

Worcester reproduced this image of Bakidan in

The Philippines Past and Present with a caption
stating that he “saved the lives” of Worcester
and others during their first trip to Kalinga
country.

Book caption: “Bakidan. This Kalinga chief saved

the lives of Colonel Blas Villamor, Mr. Samuel E.
Kane, and the author during the first trip ever made
through the Kalinga country by outsiders.”

[PPP_v1_Bakidan]

51
 Taken during his 1905 journey to Bunuan, this photograph shows Bakidan
(highlighted in red) with three other chiefs, and, at the center, Worcester and
Colonel Villamor. These four chiefs appear elsewhere in Worcester’s
photographic collection, but not identified as chiefs or brothers.

Worcester’s caption: “Blas Villamor, Bakidan, Saking, and two other brothers of
Bakidan, and myself. There are six brothers in this family and they rule the upper
Nabuagan River valley. Bakidan is the most powerful,” 1905.
Location: Bunuan, Cagayan

[dw05A010]

52
 In his 1914 book, Worcester depicted his trip to the Kalinga as a journey “In
Hostile Country” rather than a visit to a leading local politician. Worcester
noted that “the four chiefs were not as yet ready to lay down their shields or
head-axes.”

Book caption: “In Hostile Country. Colonel Villamor and the author at Bakidan’s
place in the Kalinga country. The four chiefs were not as yet ready to lay down their
shields or head-axes.”

[dw05A010]

From Fact to Fiction

Sometimes the images in the Dean Worcester collection were simplified or altered by
Worcester to serve his own political ends—he took them for political purposes, of
course. But Worcester—a politician, anthropologist, scientist, and photographer—was
unique. Sometimes images of Filipinos were used by other authors and publishers,
many of whom had little connection to the Philippines and felt less compunction about
playing fast and loose with the photographic record. Consider the following depiction of
the “educational value of the constabulary,” published in Frederick Chamberlin’s The
Philippine Problem, 1898–1913 (1913).

53
 This sequence of photographs was published in the 1910s both in a government
report and a popular account of U.S. Philippine policy. At first glance, the series
appears to tell a story of benevolent colonialism by tracing the transformation of
a soldier after “a year in jail.” But the photographic archive suggests a more
complicated history.

Illustration in Frederick Chamberlin, The Philippine Problem, 1898–1913

(Boston: Little, Brown, 1913).

Book caption: “Educational Value of the Constabulary. 1. Bontoc Igorot on entering

the service, 1901. 2. After a year’s service, 1902. 3. After two years’ service, 1903.”

[Chamberlin_Feb_03_000005_EdConst]

This sequence was a famous image of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, depicted in
government documents and popular publications. But when we trace the narrative back
from the printed page to the moment of photographic encounter, the story gets more
complicated. Worcester’s notes and archives tell a different story of transformation, in
which he took four different photographs in 1901, and only arranged them much later in
a sequence with a narrative of colonial uplift.

Worcester’s notes show that the first

photograph in the reprinted sequence was
taken in February 1901 in Manila, and that
Worcester had gone out of his way to
recruit sitters. “Took the Igorrotes home,
fed them up and photographed them,” he
noted on February 6. [2]
54
 Worcester’s caption:
“Bontoc Igorot man, type 5.
Half length profile view,” 1901.
Location: Manila, Manila

[dw08A026]

The second photograph of the sequence

—along with the one shown below—were
both taken in Manila in June 1901, and
thus could not have reflected “a year’s
service” in the Philippine Constabulary, as
the series caption claimed.

Worcester’s caption:
“Bontoc Igorot man, type 5.
2/3 length profile view,” 1901.
Location: Manila, Manila

[dw08A028]

55
The front view of this man, clearly taken
at the same time as the middle picture
above, allows his face to be seen.

Worcester’s caption:
“Bontoc Igorot man, type 5.
Half length front view,” 1901.
Location: Manila, Manila

[dw08A027]

It is unclear when or where the third

photograph in the sequence was taken. It
may have been taken in Manila in 1901 or
in the highland province of Bontoc in
1903. While this appears to be Francisco,
the same man depicted in the first of the
three photographs of the sequence, it was
not taken “after a year in jail,” as
Worcester reported in published writings
accompanying these images.

Worcester’s caption:
“Bontoc Igorot man, type 5.
After a year in jail.
Half length profile view,” 1901.
Location: Bontoc, Bontoc

[dw08A029]

56
In his diary for June 21, 1901, Worcester
noted that “Francisco had on a full rig of
cloths [sic]—white coat, trousers made
out of a pair of miner’s Alaska drawers,
army leggings and American shoes,”
closely matching this image of a
constabulary uniform (above). But in
Manila that June, Worcester also
photographed Francisco in a more
“primitive” state (right).

Worcester’s caption:
“Bontoc Igorot man, type 5.
Called Francisco.
Half length front view,” 1901.
Location: Manila

[dw08A025]

These images show the power of photographic manipulation, and cause us to ask why
an author might have wanted to shuffle photographs in service of a good story. But they
also make us wonder whether Dean Worcester was not so much a puppet-master but
also entranced by his own narrative of colonial control and uplift. Evidence suggests that
he only put the images into this narrative in a government report in 1910, but that he
used the images quite often afterward, even in his congressional testimony in 1914,
when he told Congress that “I will show you the evolution of the first Bontoc soldier who
ever enlisted…. This man is a chief named ‘Francisco,’ dressed as he had been when I
first saw him. [indicating] This slide shows how he looked a year after, after he had
been in contact with the Americans.” [3] Colonial storytelling was a complicated matter
that was never entirely under the storytellers’ control.

Recasting “Natives” for the National Geographic

The blend of the scientific and the touristic, the official and the private that marked
colonial Philippine photography reached its apotheosis in the pages of National
Geographic, the iconic magazine that brought the world to the parlors of Victorian
America. Founded in 1888, the National Geographic Society initially found few readers
for its dry and scholarly publications. But subscriptions to The National Geographic
Magazine skyrocketed after the U.S. embarked on overseas colonization, and a
revolution in printing technology enlivened the pages with photographs—many of them
painstakingly tinted and reproduced in full color. Articles on the Philippines appeared
with regularity after 1898—over 30 were published between 1898 and 1908—and
photographs from Dean Worcester’s collection illustrated many of them.

The connections between Worcester’s entourage and the National Geographic Society
were thick and deep: photographer Charles Martin, who appears often in Worcester
Collection photographs (he took many of them as well) became head of the NGS
57
Photographic Laboratory in 1915 after he left the U.S. Army.
In the pages of the magazine, Worcester shared his familiar stories of colonial uplift,
and readers delighted at the array of images that illustrated his articles. His
photographic essays were not without controversy, however; a 1903 article by another
author that depicted bare-breasted Filipina women prompted debate among the
magazine’s editors about its propriety. Worcester made a claim for the images’ scientific
value, won the argument, and revolutionized the magazine’s editorial practices.

In November 1913,
National Geographic juxtaposed the
familiar and the exotic in an article by
Dean Worcester, with a run of
hand-colored photographic illustrations
of rural Filipinos.

cover, The National Geographic

Magazine, November 1913
[ng0001_Nov1913]

58
The title of Dean Worcester’s article:
“The Non-Christian Peoples of the
Philippine Islands
With an Account of What Has Been
Done for Them under American Rule”

The National Geographic Magazine,

November 1913
[ng0002_Nov1913]

59
Thumbnails show the layout of the photographs selected and colorized for
Worcester’s article.

The National Geographic Magazine, November 1913

[ng0002_Nov1913]

60
 Presenting “Peoples”
Through his text and images—carefully hand-colored by National
Geographic staffers—Dean Worcester conveyed to a mass audience
of American readers his sense of the racial landscape of the
Philippines and boasted of “what has been done for them under
American rule.” The images selected for his November 1913 National
Geographic article introduced appealing figures representing tribes
rather than individuals; vibrant colors accentuated the sense of the
exotic for American readers.

“A Mandaya Warrior” and “A Mandaya Woman”

[ng1170-1171_Nov1913]

61
“Mangyans” (above) and “Ilongot Woman and Girls”
[ng1178-1179_Nov1913]

62
“A Negrito” (top left); “A Tagakaolo” (top right)
“A Lubuagan Igorot Woman” (bottom two images)

[ng1180-1181_Nov1913]

63
 “Tiruray Women” (top)
“A Tingian Girl” (bottom left); “A Tingian Girl in Mourning” (bottom right)

[ng1184-1185_Nov1913]

64
“An Ilongot Family” (left) and “Wild Tinglians of Apayao” (right)
[ng1186-1187_Nov1913]

65
 “A Tingian Man” (left) and “A Moro Boy” (right)
[ng1188-1189_Nov1913]

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66
LOOKING & LOOKING BACK

The U.S. imperial agenda that emerged from the Spanish-American War in 1898 was
always controversial and critics of American colonial policy continued to voice their
concerns. Many focused their attention on Dean Worcester, a vigorous supporter of U.S.
policy in the Philippines and temperamentally one of the most divisive figures in the
islands. James H. Blount, a vocal anti-imperialist, questioned Dean Worcester’s
pretensions to scientific authority and mocked him for “discovering, getting acquainted
with, classifying, tabulating, enumerating, and otherwise preparing for salvation, the
various non-Christian tribes.” Blount felt that Worcester used photography to
manipulate both Filipino subjects and American readers, trying to convince both groups
that the Philippines was unprepared for political independence. “Professor Worcester,”
he wrote, “is the P.T. Barnum of the ‘non-Christian tribe’ industry.” [1]

We know very little about the men and women who sat for Dean Worcester’s camera.
Most of them could not read or write, and so a century later we are left to decipher their
emotions and motivations from the images themselves.

Many of the images feature defiant resistance, sullenness, evasion, even obvious
boredom; a stubborn refusal to look at the photographer; or a testy stare directly back
at the camera and the political power that it embodied. There were few options for the
residents of the hill tribes who posed for Worcester and his companions, but the
photographs show their efforts to act, even within that limited range.

67
 We know little about what the men and women who sat for Worcester’s
photographs thought about the experience. We do know that some opposed his
efforts, and in images such as this, it is possible to imagine how resistance,
boredom, or testiness might have made their way into the photographic archive.

Worcester’s caption: “Group of three Tagbanua men.

Half length front view,” 1905

[dw04B001]

Some responded well, and evidence shows that Worcester’s photo-making was often a
collaborative undertaking. In his diary on February 7, 1901, he wrote that he “Made one
print from each negative before breakfast in order to show them to the Igorrotes,”
suggesting a willingness to engage in dialogue with his photographic subjects. The next
day, he noted in his diary that he had “Made prints of negatives before breakfast, so as
to give them to the Igorrotes, who were much pleased with them.” [2]

But from Worcester’s own writings, we know that some Filipinos did not appreciate his
efforts to photograph them, and sometimes his relationships with sitters were less
egalitarian.

68
 “This girl was badly frightened,” Worcester noted in
reference to the photo on the left.

Images such as this highlight the power of the photographer

over the sitter. And the role of the viewer: when reproduced
and distributed, such images conveyed messages about the
Filipino as “primitive” without calling into question the
right of the photographer to take pictures of unwilling
subjects.

Worcester’s caption: Bontoc Igorot girl, 1903.

Location: Mayinit, Bontoc

[dw08C008]

Worcester wrote of the Muslim inhabitants of the southern Philippines,

We had great difficulty in getting photographs of the Moros. They were

unduly influenced by the remarks in the Koran concerning the making of
pictures of living things…. We were obliged to steal most of our pictures,
and we found it difficult and dangerous work….

Worcester occasionally used deception to get hold of his photographs. Attending a Moro
wedding in one of his early voyages in the early 1890s, he noted:

[w]e were very anxious to get pictures of the guests, and that evening
smuggled in our dismounted camera, together with some magnesium
powders and a flashlight lamp. Under pretext of contributing our share to
the entertainment, we showed them how to make artificial lightning. Bourns
focussed by guess, I touched off magnesium powders, and in this way we
made a number of exposures, only two of which gave us negatives that
would print. [3]
69
Worcester’s blurry photograph appears below.

This overexposed photograph is one of the earliest in the Dean Worcester

collection, taken on his trip to the Philippines in 1891. In his writings, Worcester
explained how he and fellow traveler Frank Bourns schemed to photograph these
pious Muslims without their consent. According to Worcester, this group of guests
at a wedding in the Sulu province did not know that they were being
photographed.

Worcester’s caption: “Interior of a Moro house with a woman and girls in the
foreground,” 1891. Location: Jolo, Sulu

[dw23D029]

Filipinos also resisted Worcester’s Kodak by using the limited powers that were available
to them in the political arena. In 1907, in an effort to co-opt political opposition in the
islands and to delegate some of the routine tasks of governance, the U.S. established
the Philippine Assembly, a legislative body based on extremely limited voting rights. On
numerous occasions, the Filipino elites who dominated the Assembly used that forum to
object to the visual representations of the Philippines that circulated around the world in
publications like National Geographic. In 1914, the Assembly took a remarkable step
and voted to outlaw “the taking, exhibiting, or possession of photographs of naked
Filipinos” on the ground that these images “tended to make it appear that the
Philippines were inhabited by people in the nude.” [4]

The legislators in Manila were hardly friends of the rural highland Filipinos on whose
behalf they claimed to speak—in fact, they may have been embarrassed that images of
“uncivilized tribes” stood in for the Philippines as a whole in the visual record upon
which Americans gazed. Journalist Vicente Ilustre wrote in 1914 criticizing Worcester for
showing images of “these unfortunates.” [5] 70
Filipinos’ efforts to control the camera’s power drew a rebuke from Dean Worcester. In
testimony before Congress in 1914, Worcester told the Senate:

[w]e have twice had bills passed … intended to make it a criminal offense
for any person to take a photograph of those fellows up in the hills. The
Filipinos want to conceal the very fact of the existence of such people.
There has been agitation in favor of the destruction of the whole series of
Government negatives showing the customs of the non-Christian people,
the conditions which we found among them and the conditions which prevail
today.” [6]

The proposed bill never became a law. Through most of the colonial period, legislation
required the approval of the Philippine Commission (on which Dean Worcester served)
or the governor-general, and calls for modesty in rural photography were outvoted by
an insistence on the value of the images for ethnographic research. The shape-shifting
of visual anthropology—at once political surveillance, savage romance, and colonial
fantasy, always cloaked under the gaze of science—allowed it to elude the attacks of
critics.

Looking Back

The photographic encounters between Worcester and his sitters range from friendly and
easygoing to violent and unwilling. But the collection is massive and among its images
are striking views of men and women who lived through revolution, war, and colonialism
at the turn of the century and looked back at the camera in ways that capture our
attention today, reminding us that the photographic archive is never completely at the
mercy of the storyteller.

71
[dw01h007]

72
[dw08f006]

73
[dw11d004]

74
[dw08c001]

75
[dw03j015]

76
[dw02d018]

77
[dw05g002]

78
[dw05k004]

79
[dw06cc002]

80
 [dw08d002]

Closing up Shop

Dean Worcester never stopped taking photographs, but in the final years of his life he
no longer took them in an official capacity. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson and the
Democrats took office and promised a new departure for America’s Philippine policy;
longtime colonial officials—most of them known to be Republicans and devotees of
former presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft—found themselves out
of jobs. Worcester offered his resignation in September 1913 and by the 1920s had
moved to the province of Bukidnon in the southern Philippines, where he tried his hand
as a ranch owner.

81
By the time Worcester left government service in 1913, the camera was ubiquitous in
the Philippines. It was no longer the sole property of colonial officers. Photographic
images were part of the day-to-day experience of American colonial officials, and they
increasingly surrounded Filipinos as well. As a global consumer culture increasingly
penetrated Southeast Asia, photo studios popped up along the streets of Manila’s
fashionable shopping districts, and photographers soon set up shop in small towns
throughout the colony. Filipinos increasingly took their own photographs, depicting their
own lives and communities away from the gaze of colonial officials. In fact, there was
decreasing interest in photographic accounts of the Philippines, and after Worcester’s
departure, little support for ethnographic study of the colony. The Bureau of
Non-Christian Tribes closed in the 1930s, and Worcester’s photo collection was donated
to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, and then transferred to the
University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology.

Meanwhile, viewed from a century’s distance, the photographs in the Dean Worcester
Collection teach us invaluable lessons: foremost, they underline the need to consider
the power relations in any visual encounter, but particularly in those interactions that
take place on a visual terrain marked by inequalities of status, gender, and race.
Second, these photographs remind us to pay attention to the circulation of such images.
Even a century later, they must be handled with respect for the people and the cultures
they depict.

But perhaps the final lesson is that these photographs teach no easy lessons. As viewers
scrutinize these images, wondering what was going through the minds of Dean
Worcester and other photographers, wondering how these images were collected and
circulated, wondering what it was like to sit for such a photograph or to come across it
later—we must tread carefully, forego the impulse of the snapshot and its easy
legibility, and start to look in new and more egalitarian ways.

Dean Worcester’s captions for the images in “Looking Back”

[dw01h007]
Unmarried Negrito woman, type 4. Half length front view. 1900
Location: Dolores, Pampanga

[dw08f006]
Young Lubuagan man, type 4. Half length front view, sitting. 1908
Location: Lubuagan, Bontoc

[dw11d004]
Bukidnon man, type 2. 1/2 length front view, sitting. 1907
Location: Nanca, Bukidnon

[dw08c001]
Bontoc Igorot, type 1. The Presidente of Mayinit, holding his child. 1903
Location: Mayinit, Bontoc

[dw03j015]
Mangyan girl, type 7. Full length side view, squatting. 1906 82
Location: Bonganay, Mindoro

[dw02d018]
Ilongote woman, type 12. Half length front view. 1900
Location: Dumabato, Isabela

[dw05g002]
Kalinga man, type 2. Called Captain Sabaoay. Guided two military expeditions sent to
capture Aguinaldo. Half length front view. 1905
Location: Salecsec, Bontoc

[dw05k004]
Kalinga woman, type 3. 2/3 length front view. 1906
Location: Dalig, Isabela

[dw06cc002]
One of the three chiefs of Masimut, type 3. Front view, sitting. 1905
Location: Masimut, Cagayan

[dw08d002]
Old man. Full length front view. Type 1. 1907
Location: Talubin, Bontoc

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83
NOTES | SOURCES | CREDITS

On Dean Worcester’s Collection

After Dean Worcester’s death in 1924 and the closure of the Bureau of Non-Christian
Tribes in the 1930s, the photographs in his collection—taken by Worcester, Frank
Bourns, Charles Martin, and other anonymous photographers—were returned to the
United States and now are held by the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 1

1. Dean Worcester, quoted in Benito M. Vergara, Displaying Filipinos: Photography and

Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines
Press, 1995), p. 38.

2. Cameron Forbes, quoted in ibid., p. 38.

3. Brinton, Daniel G. “Professor Blumentritt’s Studies of the Philippines,” American

Anthropologist 1 (January 1899): p. 122.

4. Worcester, Dean C. “The Non-Christian Peoples of the Philippine Islands,” National

Geographic 24 (November 1913), p. 1157.

5. Sullivan, Rodney J. Exemplar of Americanism: The Philippine Career of Dean C.

Worcester (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian
Studies, 1991), p. 154.

6. Worcester, Dean C. The Philippines Past and Present (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p.
89.

7. Worcester, Dean C. “Knotty Problems of the Philippines,” Cenury Magazine 34

(October 1898), p. 876.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2

1. Hutterer, Karl L. “Dean C. Worcester and Philippine Anthropology,” Philippine

Quarterly of Culture and Society 6 no. 3 (1978), p. 142.
84
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 3

1. Hutterer, Karl L. “Dean C. Worcester and Philippine Anthropology,” Philippine

Quarterly of Culture and Society 6 no. 3 (1978), p. 151.

2. Chamberlin, Frederick. The Philippine Problem, 1898-1913 (Boston: Little, Brown &
Company, 1913), p. 159.

3. Jenks, Albert Ernest. Rev. of Dean C. Worcester, The Non-Christian Tribes of

Northern Luzon, American Anthropologist 9 (September 1907): p. 592.

4. Dean C. Worcester, June 17, 1901 diary entry, quoted in Mark Rice, “His Name Was
Don Francisco Muro: Reconstructing an Image of American Imperialism,” American
Quarterly 62 (March 2010), p. 60.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 4

1. “Calls Wild Men Our Wards,” New York Times, December 31, 1913, p. 7.

2. Dean C. Worcester, February 6, 1901 diary entry, quoted in Mark Rice, “His Name
Was Don Francisco Muro: Reconstructing an Image of American Imperialism,” American
Quarterly 62 (March 2010): p. 58.

3. Dean C. Worcester, quoted in ibid., p. 70.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 5

1. Blount, James H. The American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1912 (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), pp. 573-578.

2. Dean C. Worcester, quoted in Mark Rice, “His Name Was Don Francisco Muro:
Reconstructing an Image of American Imperialism,” American Quarterly 62 (March
2010), p. 60.

3. Worcester, Dean C. The Philippine Islands and Their People (New York: Macmillan,
1898), pp. 192-197.

4. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the
Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 375.

5. Vicente Ilustre, quoted in Karl L. Hutterer, “Dean C. Worcester and Philippine

Anthropology,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 6 no. 3 (1978), p. 141.

6. Dean C. Worcester, quoted in Rice, “His Name Was Don Francisco Muro,” p. 73.

85
SOURCES

Further Reading:

Colonialism and Photography

Beukers, Alan. Exotic Postcards: The Lure of Distant Lands (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 2007).

Brown, Michael F. Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003).

Edwards, Elizabeth. “‘Photographic Types’: The Pursuit of Method.” Visual

Anthropology 3 no. 2/3 (1990), pp. 239-258.

Edwards, Elizabeth, editor. Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1992).

Hight, Eleanor M. and Gary D. Sampson, editors. Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing

Race and Place (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Lutz, Catherine A. and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993).

Morris, Rosalind C. Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and
Southeast Asia. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

Pinney, Christopher. “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in
India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

Ryan, James R. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British
Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Stephen, Ann, editor. Pirating the Pacific: Images of Trade, Travel and Tourism.
(Haymarket, NSW: Powerhouse Publishing, 1993).

Photography in the Philippines

Brody, David. Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the

Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

De la Cruz, Enrique B. and Pearlie Rose Baluyut, editors. Confrontations, Crossings, and
Convergence: Photographs of the Philippines and the United States, 1898-1998 (Los
Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1998).

Folkmar, Daniel. Album of Philippine Types: Found in Bilibid Prison in 1903: Christians
and Moros (Including a Few Non-Christians) (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1904).

Rafael, Vicente L. “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S.
Colonization of the Philippines.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan
and Donald E. Pease, editors (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp.
185-218.
86
Roces, Marian Pastor. “Old Photographs, Recuerdos Tristes.” Filipinas Journal 5 (1983),
pp. 113-124.

Vergara, Benito M. Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th

Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995).

Dean Worcester

Hutterer, Karl L. “Dean C. Worcester and Philippine Anthropology.” Philippine Quarterly

of Culture and Society 6 no. 3 (1978), pp. 125-156.

Mojares, Resil. “Worcester in Cebu: Filipino Response to American Business,

1915-1924.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 13 no. 1 (March 1985), p.1-13.

Rice, Mark. “His Name Was Don Francisco Muro: Reconstructing an Image of American
Imperialism.” American Quarterly 62 (March 2010), pp. 49-76.

Sinopoli, Carla M. and Lars Fogelin, editors and compilers. Imperial Imaginings: The
Dean C. Worcester Photograph Collection of the Philippines, 1890-1913 (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1998).

Stanley, Peter W. “‘The Voice of Worcester Is the Voice of God’: How One American
Found Fulfillment in the Philippines.” In Reappraising an Empire: New Perspectives on
Philippine-American History, edited by Peter W. Stanley (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984), pp. 117-141.

Sullivan, Rodney J. Exemplar of Americanism: The Philippine Career of Dean C.

Worcester (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian
Studies, 1991).

Worcester, Dean C. “Notes on Some Primitive Philippine Tribes.” National Geographic 9

(June 1898), pp. 285-301.

Worcester, Dean C. The Philippine Islands and Their People (New York: Macmillan,
1898).

Worcester, Dean C. “Field Sports among the Wild Men of Northern Luzon.” National
Geographic 22 (March 1911), pp. 215-267.

Worcester, Dean C. “Head-Hunters of Northern Luzon.” National Geographic 23

(September 1912), pp. 833-930.

Worcester, Dean C. “The Non-Christian Peoples of the Philippine Islands.” National

Geographic 24 (November 1913), pp. 1157-1256.

Worcester, Dean C. The Philippines Past and Present (New York: Macmillan, 1914).

Online Resources:

University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology

87
McCoy, Alfred W. “Orientalism of the Philippine Photograph: America Discovers the
Philippine Islands.”

Philippine Photography Archive. “The United States and Its Territories, 1870-1925: The
Age of Imperialism”

CREDITS

“Photography & Power in the Colonial Philippines ll” was developed by Visualizing
Cultures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and presented on MIT
OpenCourseWare.

MIT Visualizing Cultures:

John W. Dower
Project Director
Emeritus Professor of History

Shigeru Miyagawa
Project Director
Professor of Linguistics
Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture

Ellen Sebring
Creative Director

Scott Shunk
Program Director

Andrew Burstein
Media Designer

In collaboration with:

Christopher Capozzola
Author, essay
Associate Professor of History
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

SUPPORT

Funding for this website was provided by:

The J. Paul Getty Foundation

The Henry Luce Foundation
The Andrew Mellon Foundation 88
 The U.S. Department of Education

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89