The haunting of the colonial archive in the age of digital reproduction

Katrina Macapagal
Knowledge, Cultural Memory, Archives, and Research

There is something sinister about looking at colonial photography, particularly those that contain

bodies of the colonized race. Perhaps this is because the images of these “native” bodies,

whether living or dead, were captured during the period of imperialist conquest – they thus carry

with them the violence of subjugation that the technology of photography was arguably able to

aid and preserve. Moreover, on a more basic (and admittedly rather crude) level, it is evident that

the bodies preserved in colonial photographs are now all deceased; colonial photography

contains bodies of the dead.1 As such, looking at colonized bodies from the past may convey a

sense of haunting to those who might come across them at present.

Images of the colonized included in what could be regarded as the “visual encyclopedia of

colonial rule” (Rafael 2000, p. 103) seem more haunting than non-visual texts amassed during

colonial occupation, such as literature, reports, magazines, and periodicals. Recall Susan

Sontag’s (2003, p. 71) comment on the difference between words and images that portray

violence: “Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”

Even if this sense of haunting could be derived from looking at all kinds of photographic images

(which immediately renders to the past whatever has been captured), there is a case to be made

about the historically predicated sense of haunting that one might experience upon looking at the

bodies, or the ghosts, that inhabit colonial archives. Siegfried Kracauer’s (1993, p. 431)

perception of old photographs comes to mind: “A shudder runs through the beholder/viewer of

1
This idea takes after Vicente Rafael’s study where he juxtaposed colonial photography of the living (portraits) and
the dead (corpses).
old photographs…it is not the person who appears in his or her photograph, but the sum of what

can be deducted from him or her. It annihilates the person by portraying him or her, and were a

person and portrayal to converge the person would cease to exist.2”

I wish to link this notion of haunting to the way colonized bodies are able to make themselves

visible in colonial archives today. If colonized bodies are thought of as ghosts that inhabit

colonial archives, it could be said that archives perform the function of mediation. Colonial

archives serve as mediums, receptacles that contain, or channels through which images from the

past project themselves onto the present. While haunting seems to be an outdated concept that

relates to traditional religious beliefs, it is a concept worth resurrecting given its capacity to

bridge temporalities. Avery Gordon (2008 p. xvi) uses the concept of haunting in a sociological

which I find instructive: “Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time,

the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when

the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked

from view.” Whether the “trouble” of colonialism has been exposed today is something that is up

for debate, however the passage points to the idea that the emergence of ghosts are, indeed, tied

to violent occurrences committed in the past.

What I wish to explore in this paper is how the digitization of colonial archives functions and

operates as a medium through which the ghosts of the colonial past become visible at present,

which brings up issues such as in/visibility, circulation, representation, and the preservation of

colonial knowledge. While there are indeed similarities in the operations of colonial empires,

2
In postcolonial archives, however, Hartmann et al (2002) clarifies that the task is to look for possibilities to re-
contextualize images from what Kracauer refers to as the “spatial continuum” of the past. (105).
there is always the danger of homogenizing the colonial experience in different contexts.

Nicholas Mirzoeff (1998, p. 169) notes that while colonial photographs exhibit “a certain

grammar of colonial vision,” they are also “very specific in their individual instances” (Mirzoeff

1998, p. 169). There are, for instance, salient differences between European imperialism and

American imperialism, with the latter emerging around the same time that the technology of

photography became more accessible and portable. As such, I would like to focus on the

photographic archive acquired during the United States’ colonial occupation of the Philippines

and ongoing projects of digitization. The focus is admittedly closer to home, but it more

importantly helps account for the emergence and workings of the US empire even in the so-

called age of the post-colonial.

The colonial visual archive

To my knowledge, the University of Michigan’s (UM) digital database (Fig.1) is the most

expansive collection to date that holds information on the beginnings of US imperialism, whose

actual emergence is often traced back to its victory in the mock Spanish-American War (1898).

As indicated in the title and description, the archive holds texts and images accumulated within

1870-1925, the period in which the US acquired colonial territories, which includes the formal

occupation of the Philippines in 1902. Interestingly, this massive archive (comprised of 4159 of

items as indicated upon browsing) is “complemented” by a special sub-archive of over 2,100

photographic images linked as the “Philippine Photographs Digital Archive.” The photo archive

is described as such: “In general, the images depict Filipinos, buildings, dwellings, and

monuments in and around Manila, Filipino political and military leaders, members of American
commissions and military units based in the Philippines, and numerous landscape scenes,

particularly on Mindanao and in Lanao Province [areas in the south of the country].”

Figure 1: Screen grab from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/philamer/

Before going into the issue of digitization, it would be useful first to recount the visual

dimension of US colonization. In a study that links the rise of the US empire and photography,

Mark Rice (2011) suggests that the history of US colonialism intersects with the history of

photography, such that the “legitimation of the US ambition relied on the effective use of

photography to promote US interests” (Rice 2011, p. 1). While this view tends to overemphasize

the visual as the primary means of colonization, there is some merit to the idea that the US
actively used photography, especially in comparison to the Spanish empire that ruled over the

Philippines for three hundred years. 3

The special function of photography in colonial archives derives from its capacity to seemingly

grant “scientific empiricism” (Hartman et al, 1998, p. 5) to images that justified and sustained the

colonial narrative, which is largely predicated on racial superiority, in both economic and

cultural terms. On the issue of the Western ideal body versus that of the inferior native, Mirzoeff

(1998, p. 167) notes that: “In order to provide and classify such differences, entire archives of

visual material came to exist in the nineteenth and twentieth century museums, private

collections and laboratories. One such archive is that constituted by the mass of photography

produced by colonial travellers, scientists and governments in the former colonies of Africa and

Asia.”

The American occupation of the Philippines saw the accumulation of photographic archives

which were widely circulated in mediums such as travel magazines, newspapers, postcards, and

exhibitions (Vergara 1995). A popular photograph is that of the American zoologist and

administrator Dean C. Worcester standing beside a native from the “non-Christian tribe” of

Negritos, which was featured in the National Geographic (see Fig. 2). David Brody (2010) likens

the distribution of such images in American newspapers to an “open museum” (Brody 2010, p.

88), following Edward Said’s notion of the Orient as a “museum without walls” which served to

gather and catalogue ambiguous ideas belonging to imagined Oriental culture “into

3
This is not to say, of course, that the Spanish empire did not utilize visual means of colonization. For instance,
there was an exposition on Filipino culture held in Madrid in 1887. The exposition aimed to prove the success of
Spanish rule in modernizing the Philippines in response to increasing nationalist calls for independence and armed
resistance which led to the Philippine revolution against Spain in 1896. (Rice, 2-3).
lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense”

(Brody 2010, p. 88). He further argues: “This construction of knowledge through visual

images and written text became the vehicle that helped Americans grapple with the idea of

colonizing the Philippines” (Brody 2010, p. 88).

Figure 2. National Geographic, September 1912.

The American visual archive on the Philippines accrued when the US government under then

President John Mckinley was seriously debating the “Philippine question” while the US military
was engaged in war with Filipino “insurgents.”4 US imperialism was founded on the policy of

“benevolent assimilation.” This was the emerging empire’s reworking of European manifest

destiny on “the belief that the American model of imperialism was different from Europe’s and

more morally acceptable” (Maxwell 2010, p. 6). Following formal occupation in 1902, Governor

General W. Cameron Forbes commended the photography collection compiled under what was

called the Bureau of Science, as comprising “a great science library serving as a storehouse of

knowledge not only for the Philippines, but for much of the East” (cited in Vergara 1995, p. 38).

The General moreover said: “If a photograph were needed, this bureau not only took it, but filed

it away so that it might be available in the years to come” (cited in Vergara 1995, p. 38).

According to Benito Vergara (1995, p. 38), the accumulation of photographs indicates that the

“Archive’s link to the passage of time is not a static assemblage of images but an evolving

collection coinciding with the civilizing process, and one assembled for self-reference as well.”

Bodies of knowledge in the colonial visual archive

Even as colonization began as territorial acquisition, it is not difficult to see how this project

expanded to include the acquisition of bodies. Colonial archives had to include, in large part,

images that would “typify” the appearance of the bodies of the colonized. Akin to the emergence

of photographic archives for the disciplinary purposes of policing and criminology (Sekula 1986,

p. 17), the photographic archive of colonized bodies served to conjoin the contradictory ideas of

4
In his research on the subject of the forgotten Philippine-American War, Filipino critic Oscar Campomanes (2002
p. 140) describes finding: “Scores of early motion pictures, thousands upon thousands of photographs, countless
graphics or cartoons, reams of journalistic prose, tomes of instant ethnographies and colonial reports and major
world’s fairs” depicting Filipino inferiority that contributed to the “cultural politics” of benevolent assimilation. See
“Casualty Figures of the American Soldier and the Other: Post-1898 Allegories of Imperial Nation-Building as
‘Love and War’,” in Vestiges of War: The Philippine American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream 1899-
1999, Eds. Angela Velasco Shaw and Luisa H. Francia. New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 134-162.

love and discipline in the policy of benevolent assimilation. Vicente Rafael (2000, p. 23) argues

that: “The re-formation of natives as colonial subjects required that they become visible and

therefore accessible to those charged with their supervision.” Premised on the notion of “white

love,” that is the myth of preparing and guiding the colonized race for eventual independence,

the subsequent classification of natives in photographic archives “amounted to a powerful form

of surveillance, setting the limits of colonial identities within the borders of the state” (Rafael

2000, p. 23).

Consider, for example, the juxtaposition of two photos used as the front piece of Worcester’s

widely circulated book, The Philippines Past and Present (1914), in which he lauded the success

of American imperialism (Fig.3). Labeled “The Metaphormosis of a Bontoc Igorot,” the photos

suggest that benevolent assimilation resulted in the evolution of the naked, infantilized native to

the fully-clothed, adult male. Apart from infatilization, the feminized portrayal of Filipino

natives is evident in the abundance of female bodies in the colonial archive. Those included in

the Worcester collection, for instance, mostly depict female bodies as passive or frightened, and

a number of them are posed to expose the naked body. For instance, looking over the Worcester

collection, M. Biannet Castellanos (in Sinopoli and Fogelin 1998, Chapter 3) observes that: “In

many instances, the women and girls have had their clothes removed to facilitate the viewer’s

gaze on particular parts of their bodies, specifically their breasts.”



Figure 3. From The Philippines Past and Present (1914).

The imperial compulsion for measuring and classifying colonized bodies is apparent in the

accumulation of colonial archives, given that “anthropometric photography offered a new form

of imperial knowledge about colonial peoples that signaled a shift from mapping sites to

mapping visuality” (Hartmann et al, 1998, p. 5). Within the US colonial archives, this is

illustrated in studies such as an anthropological report by Robert Bean (1910) that classified the

Negrito tribe based on facial features (ears in particular) and hair type. The report partly

concludes: “The Negritos in the Mariveles mountain appear to be the purest Negritos in the
Philippine Islands, judging from the photographs…The women are more Primitive than the men,

who are more Iberian and Australoid than the women…” (1910, p. 235). On the aspect of

colonial discipline, Daniel Folkmar (1998) featured images of eighty Filipino prisoners that

utilized anthropometric photography in a book called Album of Philippine Types: Found in

Bilibid Prison in 1903 (Folkmar cited in Castellanos in Sinopoli and Fogelin 1998, Chapter 3).

In 1903, the colonial government initiated the Philippine Census, regarded as the “the American

colonial state’s first major attempt at ordering the colony and casting its net of surveillance over

its colonized subjects” (Vergara, 1995 p. 39). This 1903 census can be considered the execution

of the most massive consolidation attempt at discipline and surveillance, in the form of statistical

archive, on the part of the new colonial government. In fact, Filipinos who partook in the

collection of data were made to swear allegiance to the American government beforehand

(Rafael 2000, pp. 27-28). Apart from classifying the colonized bodies through limited tribes

(broadly classified as “wild” and “civilized”) and skin color (with five categories ranging from

black to white), the full census report was illustrated with images that function to correspond

with the different categories invented in the census (Rafael 2000, pp. 37-38). The images thus

functioned to visualize the statistical data in the census, within the framework of subjecting the

colonized bodies as objects of reform.

 Figure 4. Images from Imperial Imaginings: The Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection of the Philippines, 1890-1913. (1998)

Photo 08A026 Photo 08A027

Bontoc Igorot man, type 5. Half length profile view. Bontoc Igorot man, type 5. Half length front view.
1901 1901
Location: Manila, Manila Location: Manila, Manila

Photo 08A029
Photo 08A028 Bontoc Igorot man, type 5. After a year in jail. Half
Bontoc Igorot man, type 5. 2/3 length profile view. length profile view.
1901 1901
Location: Manila, Manila Location: Bontoc, Bontoc
If seen through imperialist lens, colonized bodies constitute the visual archive whose circulation

served to affirm the process of colonization. But the reverse could be said if we consider how

these bodies perpetually haunt the colonial archive. Instead of seeing how these bodies were

colonized, forever trapped within the frame of the colonial visual archive, perhaps we can now

look at how these bodies themselves are able to colonize the archive, given that they seem so

“excessively visible,” to use Rafael’s turn of phrase (Rafael 2000, p. 91). Rafael (2000) argued

as much in his reading of photographs of corpses of Filipino “insurgents” which were then used

to prove the superiority of the US military. Perhaps the same can be said of the bodies subjected

to the discipline and surveillance of the colonial lens, considering the overwhelming number of

images of “native” bodies that in turn, overwhelm the colonial visual archive itself.

On the emergence of the photographic archive, Sekula (1986 p. 57) has noted that: “Photography

was to be both an object and means of bibliographic rationalization.” The same might be said for

the colonized bodies who inhabit the colonial archive—these bodies were the objects of the

visual archive, but it was through their massive acquisition that archive itself was formulated.

The colonial visual archive lives on, in a manner of speaking, through the massive acquisition of

bodies whose overwhelming presence had to be categorized in order for them to be contained

and disciplined according to the colonial narrative. In this regard, Roland Barthes’ term for the

“target” of the photograph comes to mind: ‘And the person or thing photographed is the

target…which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains,

through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in

every photograph: the return of the dead’ (Barthes 1981, p. 9). But this goes back to the notion of

haunting earlier mentioned, because even though these are bodies of the dead, they inhabit the
archives so that the archive builds its imagined body of knowledge upon and around the dead.

Following Michel Foucault (1989, p. 146): “Nor is the archive that which collects the dust of

statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the miracle of their

resurrection; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement or thing; it is the

system of its functioning.”

Digitizing projects

“When the photograph moves out of its stored archive space, it is as if energy is released.”

(Hatmann et al, 2002, 104). This energy, I think, relates to the haunting quality of looking at

colonial photography today, which is mediated by the changing nature of the archive itself. This

brings us back to the prospects of digitizing colonial photography, such as the University of

Michigan’s online database. In what ways does digitizing remove colonial images from the

archive space of the past so that they may move into the (cyber)space of the present, a medium

that might be able re-cast/re-contextualize the historical conditions from which these images

were initially captured?

From the onset, the nature of photography already lends itself to such a removal, the “arbitrary

framing” that Sontag has pointed out. “Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous,

from anything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently" (Sontag 1973, p. 17).

Walter Benjamin’s (1936) foundational essay on mechanical reproduction has often been cited to

make sense of how traditional meanings might be re-framed: “By making many reproductions it

substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to

meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.”
Digitization allows colonial images from the past to enter present, and even projects them into

the future with the prospect of preservation.

It is not difficult to see how the reproduction of colonial photography through digitizing permits

greater access and future circulation, for individual use. For instance, perhaps one of the earliest

attempts to digitize the massive Worcester collection comes in the form of a CD-ROM (1998

Imperial Imaginings), comprised of 1200 images out of the 5000 held by the UM Museum of

Anthropology.5 The CD includes critical essays that re-frame the imperialist intentions of the

Worcester images, which should ideally allow the viewer to situate the images within the period

in which they were captured. As explained by Sinopoli, digitization allowed for the transfer of

images from original glass negatives to high resolution scans. The decision to digitize was based

on preservation and distribution, as well as the availability of funding (Sinopoli 2011, Personal

communication. From this, it may be said that digital technology allows for the greater visibility

(zooming in, for instance, for further scrutiny) of the photographic archive today, compared to

photographic prints.

It’s also interesting to look into the process of cataloguing that preceded the digital output.

According to the preface in the CD, the database tried to accurately record the original labels on

the envelopes containing the glass plates (believed to have been written by Worcester himself or

those under his watch), however the museum has also decided to include new categories for

better search options. Through this example, we see how digitization produces new ways of

55
The Worcester collection of photographs taken in the Philippines amounts to almost 16,000 which is held by
different museums in the US.
archiving, and at the same time we are exposed to the totalizing drive of the archive as we note

the excessive number of images that the collection boasts.

The same archival processes are manifested in the structure of the UM Philippine photographs

digital archive. Compared to the Worcester CD, however, the viewer must navigate through the

archive without guidance, except for the minimal text in the title and the links. Why, for instance,

were those images selected to illustrate the index page of the digital archive? It seems that the

archive’s design invites the complicity of the viewer with pre-conceived expectations of what

colonial photographs look like. And so we see typical nativist images: the rural landscape, the

profile of the native man, and of course, the image of a troop of US soldiers. Perhaps, these kinds

of institutional/academic archives assume critical viewers in the first place, but then again,

digital archives are not as arbitrary as they seem if we consider Lev Manovich’s (2001) insights

on the principle of hyperlinks. On the subject of interactive new media, Manovich suggests that:

“we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations,” such that we

ultimately “identify with somebody else’s mental structure” (2001, pp. 55-56). The persistence

of pre-conceived colonial knowledge is apparent, for instance, in a review of the Worcester CD

that concludes with this highly uncritical statement: “While the three introductory chapters are

interesting, the photographs are a delightful treat, one that provides a rich glimpse of the

Philippines at the turn of the century-its people, places, and material culture” (Youngblood

1999).

By way of ending, consider the user-generated and easily accessible images below that suggest

the emergence of counter-archives within the space offered by new media (Fig. 5-7). At an age
that is celebrated as having witnessed the death of empires, so to speak, in the wake of

decolonizing movements across the globe, these images attempt to re-capture the haunting

energy of colonial casualties for viewers of the present. Whether this energy is enhanced or

diffused through digital mediation remains in question, but what’s clear is that the images remain

visible and in circulation by virtue of digitization. To borrow the words of Sontag: “Let the

atrocious images haunt us.” (2003, 89).

Figure 5. Image from http://pixeloffensive.tumblr.com/post/20043377198

Figure 6. Image from http://pixeloffensive.tumblr.com/post/21357176926


Figure 7. Image from http://pixeloffensive.tumblr.com/post/20511196115
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