All You Have to Do is Look: On Jeremy Villaluz’ Enclave

By Benito Vergara Jr.

​To take invisibility as the basis for a book of photographs seems the natural order of things. The photographer is expected to fulfill the promise of vision: to reveal, to uncover. From Jacob Riis to Trevor Paglen, the aim of photography is to make the hidden visible. Jeremy Villaluz's Enclave works from a similar premise, but his materials, as it were, are in plain sight. All you have to do is look. His act of looking, however, is not one of peeking through curtains from the outside -- not as intrusion or voyeurism -- but as an open hand, an invitation to the viewer to come inside.

But there is a contradiction between his desire "to peel back the layers of a landscape," as Villaluz puts it, and what he chooses to show us. It begins with the deliberate, generic flatness of his monograph's title -- Enclave -- and its political connotation as a territory surrounded by another state. His subject, of course, is an ethnic enclave -- and yet its sociological referents are nowhere to be seen. Where are the kinship networks? Where is the ethnic identity?

Most of his landscapes are curiously devoid of people, the suburban streets as empty as Atget's Paris. In one photograph, a flock of (migrating?) birds disturbs a Richard Misrach palette of blue and yellow. In another, a car is covered with fabric the same blue (I'll call it Eggleston-blue) as the color of the sky above it. They're photographs of absence. The handful of people who appear in the interiors -- even a pair of abandoned shopping carts -- are turned away from the camera, as if Villaluz did not wish to intrude on their privacy.

Villaluz crucially intersperses these color photographs with more intimate images of his family and friends at restaurants and in living rooms. Sometimes, they look back at us. The suggestion here is that they are photographed with their full participation. These photographs are mostly in black and white, as if to argue that their vitality should be apparent despite the gray of their surroundings. Enclave is not simply a straightforward portrait of a community -- or to use outmoded parlance, a "subculture." Villaluz is a more astute photographer than that. The effect of his alternation between the living and the "hella dead" is to invite the viewer to constantly reflect on the previous photos. There's nothing "Filipino," you might say, about this lonely shot of a BART train seat, empty except for a discarded newspaper. But there is, Villaluz insists. All you have to do is look.

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Invisibility and absence are not new metaphors to describe the Filipino community in the United States. Fred and Dorothy Cordova employ this discursive absence as the central metaphor for their pioneering monograph, Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans (1983). Even with the high concentration of Filipinos in Daly City (almost 31%, in a population of 111,000), as Villaluz writes, "the existence of this enclave still largely goes unnoticed."

The large influx of Filipino immigrants to the United States can be directly attributed to the 1965 Immigration Act, whose policies created a concentration of middle-class professionals in understaffed fields -- accounting, teaching, engineering, and especially nursing. But Filipino America begins closer to the end of the 19th century, as the direct result of American warfare and colonialism. Filipinos, as members of the newly colonized territory, came to Hawai'i and up and down the Pacific Coast at the height of the Depression as (overwhelmingly male) migrant laborers: pineapple, sugar, artichokes, asparagus, salmon were the fruits of their labor, so to speak.

But a significant number of Filipinos -- with an education in English that differentiated them from other East Asian immigrants -- ended up being employed in the service industries. This meant that Filipinos had a wider range of employment than, for instance, the relatively more socially isolated Chinese. Filipinos found jobs as bellboys, valets, ushers, waiters -- in short, industries where a polite self-effacement was deeply steeped into the essence of the job itself, efficiency and invisibility intertwined.

Villaluz situates his monograph in a period of intense economic change for the region, where debates about gentrification in San Francisco, just across the border to Daly City's north, have been elevated to a national level. Daly City, with its reputation as a  quiet bedroom community, a "mid-century American dreamland turned ethnic enclave," is not immune to these changes. In a city where the median household income is $66,000, and the median home price is almost $725,000 (and median rent in the $3500s), it is not difficult to do the math and see the fate of renters and long-time residents. One of Villaluz's photos shows an overflowing garbage can, a soda drink from Jollibee (the most popular fast-food chain in the Philippines) next to a cup of Philz (Bay Area purveyor of pricey coffee). Change may seem slow, but it's happening. All you have to do is look.

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Villaluz's clearest predecessor in photographic subject matter is Bill Owens' classic Suburbia, a portrait of Livermore, California in 1972. (Owens began his project after taking a class in visual anthropology at San Francisco State University, where, as it happens, I met Villaluz, and where the latter is currently teaching.) Owens' approach was to juxtapose the neutral, documentary-like aspect of his photographs with his subjects' commentary, in ways that sometimes undercut the image itself.

Photographs shouldn't have to be explained, one can easily argue; it is the viewers who create meaning, who are free to generate their own interpretations. The aesthetic merits of an image should be wholly contained within the frame. And yet Villaluz works against this artistic dictum to great effect in a section of endnotes, almost as if to undermine the apparent legibility of his images. His personal reflections, where he proceeds to inscribe each photograph with individual meaning, act as a counterpoint to the simple procession of images. The long captions are there to prevent meaning from floating away.

One might see Villaluz's work as a personal and political reclamation of Owens' Suburbia. It's didactic in the most positive sense of the word. His project is characterized with a productive tension between letting the images speak for themselves, versus a Filipino voice struggling to be heard. He wants to be explicit about what he means, to nudge the viewer towards clarity, as something out of necessity: against misinterpretation, against forgetting, against invisibility.