Women making
sandwiches, South Bronx, New York, 1981.
Photo by Frank Espada,
courtesy National Museum of American History
The Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History recently acquired photographic works of
Latino photographer Francisco Luis Espada (1930–2014), whose best-known
collection, “The Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project,” will be housed in
the museum’s Archives Center, where it will be available for research,
exhibition and educational purposes. This portion of Espada’s portfolio with
several hundred prints, thousands of negatives and more than 140 oral histories
is just a sampling of the artist’s larger collection.
The museum is
preparing an online finding tool and will post selected images to begin making
the collection accessible to researchers and scholars. This is the only
collection of its size by a known Latino photographer in the Smithsonian
collections. Other examples of Espada’s work can be seen at the Smithsonian’s
National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Lennie, Connecticut,
1980.
Photo by Frank Espada,
courtesy National Museum of American History
The “Diaspora”
collection consists of never-before seen photographs, negatives and original
digital prints that Espada made between 1970 and 2000. Espada’s collection is
approximately 13 cubic feet with more than 5,000 images, 800 prints from
previous exhibitions, vintage or mounted, original negatives, digitized
interviews and includes access to the text from his book The Puerto Rican
Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People. The “Puerto Rican Diaspora
Documentary Project,” the focal point of the collection, is assembled into 10
binders of negatives and in boxes of test prints and proofs.
“What makes this
collection unique is not only its size but that for every one image printed,
there are many other negatives and test prints that show different versions of
the same scene.” said Steve Velasquez, curator in the Division of Home and
Community Life. “It is one of the only collections offering multiple vantage
points of a subject, period and location.”
For the “Diaspora”
project, Espada interviewed hundreds of people and photographed their work
places, homes and communities. Subjects of his portraits include community
leaders such as the Director of El Museo del Barrio Jack Agüeros, author Piri
Thomas, activist Manny Diaz and Director of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre
Miriam Colón, among others. He stated that his work documenting the Puerto
Rican community exists “to celebrate [their] culture, to educate the community
at large, to make a political statement, and to remind everyone that [they] are
a national presence.”
Espada’s work spans
several distinct periods, beginning with the 1950s and ’60s depiction of New
York street life and documentation of the civil rights movement; moving into
the 1970s and ’80s with a focus on Puerto Rican identity; and in the 1980s to
’90s, detailing California’s HIV/AIDs epidemic needle-exchange program. His
work also captured some of history’s most recognized moments, including rallies
by the NAACP, Malcolm X and the March on Washington. Images and more
information about Espada can be viewed at thefrankespadagalleries.com.
The Puerto Rican
Rainbow. Ca. 1981
Photo by Frank Espada,
courtesy National Museum of American History
On March 2, 1917,
President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones Act confirming Puerto Rico had become
a U.S. territory. Puerto Rican citizens were granted statutory citizenship,
triggering a large migration to the U.S. Espada, born in Utuado, Puerto Rico,
in 1930, migrated to New York in 1939. While serving in the U.S. Air Force in
1949, he was jailed for a week after refusing to move to the back of a bus due
to the color of his skin. That event triggered his activist career. Espada was
an alumnus of the New York Institute of Photography, a founder of East New York
Action and a member of the New York Urban Coalition. He relocated to the West
Coast where he taught at University of California Berkley Extension in San
Francisco. He died in 2014 and is considered a humanitarian, civil rights and
community activist.
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