Picturing tribal women in Mindanao
Woven Threads is a series of photographs commissioned by Community Aid Abroad to document work the organization has sponsored over several years with women of the T'boli and Manobo tribes on the island of Mindanao, the Philippines. In commissioning Anne Zahalka, the organisation professed a desire to break with stereotypical representations of the 'developing' world.[1] Given that these representations are wont (in the discourse of development aid) to construct third world populations as subjects of lack, who require completion by the philanthropic intervention of the West (for which the viewer stands in) whose agency alone can save them from the ravages of global markets, natural disasters and other assorted calamities, this exploration of new ways of articulating the relationship between the providers and recipients of development aid can only be welcome.
Zahalka succeeds, although not unqualifiedly, in returning a degree of agency and subjectivity to the tribal women she depicts in this series of formally posed portraits. Approximately half of her subjects, imaged standing against figureless landscapes transformed by logging and agriculture return the viewer's gaze frankly. The rest look off-camera in a self-possessed and contemplative mood. The photographer's exclusive use of the long and medium-long shot creates a sense of distance that refuses viewers the privilege of an intimate social relationship with the women, putting us rather in the position of strangers passing in a shared social space, from time to time subject to the noncommittal gaze of the locals.
Zahalka presents three versions of six original images, each series being manipulated by computer: one sepiatoned, one colour-enhanced and reproduced at postcard size, and one relatively naturalistic. A number of the smaller images and the sepia images have