Visual Voice: The Migrant Photography of Xyza Cruz Bacani

• In Event: 358. The Philippines in the World: Ties and Tensions in Philippine History and Cultures

Abstract

What does photographing from beyond and below entail and signify? What does this practice want? Hong Kong-based Filipina domestic helper Xyza Cruz Bacani is being recognized the world over for her distinctive take on capturing images. This distinction is founded on difference, particularly the subaltern status of a poor woman from the Third World becoming a “creative genius” by exposing the condition of fellow workers.
Bacani’s body of work exhibits the fraught condition of a photographic practice that dissents: a documentary work that relies on the presumed authority of the visual, a conflicted relation to an aestheticizing style that leads to anaestheticizing response, a morally charged witnessing that engages the country of origin which has forced the migration of millions, a keen attention to individual human isolation in highly cosmopolitan settings, and an aspirational status for the photographer that may conflict with the anonymity expected of someone in her profession. This paper is an initial study on the life and practice of an emergent artist who predicates her artistic work on the affective dimensions of social and national belonging as seen from outside the nation and the margins of the host society.

Author

• JPaul S. Manzanilla, National University of Singapore