“The sigh of history rises over ruins…Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.”
― Derek Walcott, Fragments of Epic Memory
My memory of Puerto Rico oscillates between the locus of a place I’ve only visited and an imaginary drawn from my family's memory. In Walcott’s speech, he sees poetry in a similar way to how I see photography, “as an act of remaking, an act that can conjugate both the past and present ” to reconcile these disparate visions. It’s the photograph’s ability to continue; to transcend its temporality, into present conversations, that I am most drawn to.
Before and after Hurricane Maria, I photographed this landscape. There is this tendency within landscape photography to think that somehow the landscape is neutral and timeless; as if it isn’t shaped by human forces. It’s clear to see scars from the military’s presence here. Its easy to observe how climate change and colonial neglect has leveled neighborhoods and shorelines.
But, this land isn’t empty. It’s inhabited by a people who will persevere into the future. It still echos with stories, footprints, traces of my parents, grandparents and now myself during my summers here.