Norma I. Quintana, “Future Electorate” (2024) (left) and “Trump Voter” (2024) (pictures courtesy the artist)
They used to name them recuerdos (which means recollections, but additionally souvenirs or keepsakes), the portraits captured towards a painted backdrop by itinerant photographers identified in Puerto Rico and elsewhere as ambulantes. In distinction to the scenic pictures exported en masse to advertise a picturesque imaginative and prescient for international traders and vacationers, these had been extremely private snapshots, usually taken with a particular recipient in thoughts.
“The photos would be sent out to the mainland as a way of saying: ‘I’m thinking of you, I miss you,’” mentioned Norma I. Quintana, whose mother and father immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, from the Puerto Rican mountain city of Lares. Her mom despatched Quintana’s father one such token of remembrance from the island, considered one of a number of saved in household albums, and the artist posed for comparable studio portraits as a toddler throughout journeys again to go to kin.
Quintana has photographed round 100 people in her present house of Napa Valley within the classic type of “recuerdos” for her ongoing collection Neglect Me Not (No Me Olvides) (2004–ongoing), channeling a Puerto Rican and Latin American image-making custom right into a meditation on on a regular basis folks.
“It is my hope that viewers can see themselves in the photographs, and by doing so make the Puerto Rican experience their experience,” Quintana informed me in a cellphone name final week.
It’s a sentiment that has stayed with me over the previous couple of days, as Donald Trump ramped up his dehumanizing discourse towards undocumented immigrants, US residents corresponding to Puerto Ricans, the trans group, and extra — a technique that works by othering sure teams to propagate harmful delusions of racial and class-based superiority.
Neglect Me Not dismantles this fallacy by harnessing “common humanity and what bonds us,” in Quintana’s phrases.
“Nobody should think, ‘Oh, this doesn’t apply to me,’” she mentioned. “We are all Puerto Rican.”
Among the many numerous people who’ve sat for her, from military veterans to circus performers, are a younger Kamala Harris supporter and an older Trump voter. In separate silver gelatin prints, they’re every depicted towards the identical backdrop of softly rendered waves crashing towards a rocky shore, leaning on a hand-painted picket stand.
Quintana, who finds her topics by stopping folks on the road or assembly them by means of neighbors, may sense the older man’s hesitation when she approached him, describing “a level of suspicion and mistrust that was a rare reaction to my invitation to be photographed.” The pictures could also be seen as paperwork of division, however they’re rooted within the centuries-old impulse to chronicle, join, and bridge distances.
Quintana’s venture gave me hope, on this darkest of moments, that artwork could be transcendent — and that we are able to see the sunshine of our shared function on the finish of the lengthy street forward.
