CHICKEN HANDS: Inside Ryan Arbillo’s devastating portrait of labor, migration, and the Filipino body pushed beyond exhaustion

Words by Mye Mulingtapang | Photos courtesy of Ryan Arbillo

The hands appear too large for the women they belong to. Thickened knuckles protrude beneath skin hardened by years of detergent, cold water, factory chemicals, market labor, caregiving, and repetition. Nails darken unevenly. Joints bend at strange angles. Veins rise beneath the surface like exposed roots.

The women themselves remain still. No dramatic expressions. No theatrical grief. No attempt to seduce the viewer into sympathy.

They sit upright against dark backgrounds while their hands occupy nearly half the frame, as though the body has reorganized itself entirely around labor.

At first glance, the title Chicken Hands lands almost offensively. Then the photographs begin to work on the nervous system.

In Ryan Arbillo’s Chicken Hands, first exhibited in 2009, the body becomes historical evidence. The photographs are not asking viewers to admire suffering. 

They are documenting what prolonged labor physically does to people when survival becomes a permanent condition rather than a temporary hardship.

More than fifteen years later, the images remain deeply unsettling because almost nothing about the conditions they expose has disappeared.

If anything, the world simply became more dependent on invisible labor while becoming more skilled at hiding its consequences.

The women in Arbillo’s portraits were Filipino cleaning workers in France, many of whom arrived undocumented, unable to speak the language, terrified of deportation, and separated from children left behind in the Philippines. Arbillo wrote that their hands had become “deformed by manual labor” and resembled chicken feet.

The comparison initially feels cruel. Then the photographs begin revealing why it matters. Because the title is not merely describing anatomy. It is describing hierarchy.

Chicken feet belong to economies of necessity. Cheap appendages boiled into soup, grilled on sidewalks, sold in wet markets, consumed because nothing can afford to be wasted. In many Filipino working-class households, chicken hands are not novelty food. They belong to a survival cuisine built  around extension — extending hunger, extending money, extending endurance.

Arbillo takes that cultural memory and folds it back onto the Filipino body itself. The result is psychologically devastating.

THE VIOLENCE HIDDEN INSIDE “RESILIENCE”

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The photographs work because they refuse abstraction.

Nothing here feels symbolic at first. The hands are simply present in all their physical specificity. Thickened fingertips. Enlarged joints. Veins rising beneath skin worn down by chemicals, cold water, repetitive cleaning, caregiving, lifting, scrubbing, carrying.

These are not imagined working hands. They are hands permanently altered by labor.

The frontal composition intensifies this confrontation. Arbillo photographs the women directly against dark backgrounds, removing nearly all environmental distractions. The oversized hands dominate the foreground while the faces recede slightly behind them, creating subtle visual distortion.

Identity becomes secondary to function.

The effect feels almost anatomical. The viewer studies the body the way institutions study utility — examining what remains productive, what has been consumed, what still works despite visible deterioration.

That is what makes Chicken Hands feel so contemporary despite being created in 2009.

The global economy has only become more dependent on outsourced care labor since then. Filipino women continue staffing hospitals, private homes, hotels, kitchens, elderly care facilities, cruise ships, and cleaning industries worldwide. Entire economies function smoothly because invisible workers absorb exhaustion quietly.

The photographs resonate now because viewers recognize the infrastructure immediately. The labor never disappeared. Society simply normalized it further.

WHEN LABOR BECOMES ANATOMY

Filipino resilience has become one of the most aggressively marketed national traits in the modern world.

Governments praise it. Employers depend on it. Diaspora narratives glorify it.Families survive through it.

But Chicken Hands quietly interrogates the psychological violence hidden beneath that language. What people call resilience is often prolonged exposure to conditions others were protected from.

The women in Arbillo’s photographs are not framed as inspirational figures. That restraint matters enormously. Too many representations of Filipino labor collapse into emotional propaganda — stories designed to transform exhaustion into moral beauty.

Arbillo refuses that emotional shortcut. The women are neither romanticized nor reduced into symbols of tragedy. Instead, they appear exhausted in ways that feel structurally familiar. Their bodies reveal what happens when sacrifice stops being temporary and becomes inherited expectation.

In many Filipino households, endurance is taught early. Parents suppress fatigue because children must eat. Mothers continue working through pain because the household depends on continuity. Migrants tolerate loneliness because remittances matter more than emotional stability.

The body adapts because survival requires adaptation. Until adaptation itself becomes injury. Arbillo photographs the aftermath of that arrangement.

One of the most devastating aspects of Chicken Hands is how precisely it captures the gendered nature of invisible labor. These hands belong to women whose work historically disappears into the background of everyday life.

Cleaning, cooking, laundry, caregiving, child-rearing, elder care and domestic maintenance.

Tasks societies depend on absolutely while simultaneously undervaluing them economically and culturally.

The photographs expose the contradiction physically. The women’s hands appear enormous because their labor has been enormous.

Yet the workers themselves remained largely socially invisible. This invisibility extends beyond France. It exists across the Filipino diaspora globally. Millions of Filipina workers leave home to care for other people’s households while remaining separated from their own families for years at a time. The emotional structure of overseas Filipino labor is deeply paradoxical.

Women leave to provide intimacy economically. But the labor itself requires distance. Children grow up through video calls. Mothers miss birthdays and funerals.

Care becomes logistical. Money transfers replace physical presence.

Sacrifice becomes normalized through repetition.

Arbillo’s portraits contain traces of this loneliness without dramatizing it. 

The world praises Filipino resilience with unsettling enthusiasm.

THE FEMINIZATION OF INVISIBLE WORK

The women’s expressions remain controlled, but their stillness carries emotional fatigue difficult to fake. He once wrote that he wanted to capture “their silence, their weariness, their loneliness, through the sorrowful expressions on their hands.”

That sentence explains why the photographs remain emotionally effective years later. The hands are not passive objects. They become emotional surfaces onto which entire migration histories have been written.

WHY THE PHOTOGRAPHS STILL FEEL UNCOMFORTABLY CURRENT

A weaker series would have become historically distant by now — frozen inside the political atmosphere of the late 2000s.

Chicken Hands did not.

The photographs still feel painfully current because the conditions surrounding them persist almost unchanged.

Undocumented migrant labor still powers major European economies. Domestic workers still remain socially invisible until a crisis emerges. Filipino women still disproportionately absorb caregiving industries globally. Working-class bodies still deteriorate quietly beneath narratives of productivity and gratitude.

If anything, the emotional relevance deepened after the pandemic. COVID exposed how dependent societies truly are on labor previously considered low-status or replaceable. Suddenly, cleaners, caregivers, nurses, delivery workers, supermarket employees, and domestic laborers became “essential.”

The photographs stop functioning as portraits and begin functioning as evidence.

But essential did not necessarily mean protected. It simply meant necessary.

Arbillo’s photographs anticipated this contradiction years earlier. The women’s hands already carried the evidence of being indispensable and undervalued simultaneously.

That duality remains central to global labor systems today.

The photographs resonate because viewers now understand more clearly how entire societies function through managed invisibility. Some people remain visible through leadership. Others remain visible only through service.