Stephanie Syjuco: After/Images examines how the camera records and constructs American histories. Mining the archives of major US institutions, Syjuco (born 1974, Manila, Philippines) engages with photographs and objects to reframe our view. She uses photographic tools such as color-calibration charts, Photoshop applications, and even her own hands, which gently intervene in images.
Syjuco’s works reveal the authorial control in image making. This theme materializes in Still Life Construct: Background as Foreground (2022)—a theatrical staging of photographic and museological props. Another series of photographs sets a bucking bronco sculpture by the American artist Frederic Remington (1861–1909) against a studio backdrop, suggesting the role institutions play in preserving fabricated mythologies of the western frontier. Across the exhibition, Syjuco traces American military expeditions overseas, including the United States’s occupation of the Philippines (1898–1946), as an extension of Manifest Destiny, the nineteenth-century belief that the US’s westward expansion was preordained. The artist assembles collaged photographs with meticulous care to question how the United States narrates ideas of empire, citizenship, and belonging within its own archives. In other artworks, Syjuco challenges historical photographs by crumpling, pixelating, and otherwise tending to them to offer moments of resistance for those subjected to the camera’s gaze.
Syjuco’s artistic interventions demonstrate how standing behind the camera—seeing without being seen—is a position of power that enables the photographer to shape the visual record. She explodes the neutrality of photography, unveiling the constructed nature of images and the histories they narrate.
After/Images is accompanied by a monograph of Syjuco’s work that features full-color illustrations and essays by Aruna D’Souza, Georgia Erger, and Ekalan Hou.