Norma I. Quintana, “Future Electorate” (2024) (left) and “Trump Voter” (2024) (photographs courtesy the artist)
They used to name them recuerdos (that means recollections, but in addition souvenirs or keepsakes), the portraits captured in opposition to a painted backdrop by itinerant photographers recognized in Puerto Rico and elsewhere as ambulantes. In distinction to the scenic photographs exported en masse to advertise a picturesque imaginative and prescient for international buyers and vacationers, these have been extremely private snapshots, typically taken with a selected 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 dad and mom 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, certainly one of a number of stored in household albums, and the artist posed for related studio portraits as a baby throughout journeys again to go to kinfolk.
Quintana has photographed round 100 people in her present residence of Napa Valley within the classic fashion of “recuerdos” for her ongoing sequence Overlook 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 individuals.
“It is my hope that viewers can see themselves in the photographs, and by doing so make the Puerto Rican experience their experience,” Quintana instructed 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 in opposition to undocumented immigrants, US residents reminiscent of 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.
Overlook 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 in opposition to the identical backdrop of softly rendered waves crashing in opposition to a rocky shore, leaning on a hand-painted wood stand.
Quintana, who finds her topics by stopping individuals on the road or assembly them by way of neighbors, might 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 mission gave me hope, on this darkest of moments, that artwork might be transcendent — and that we are able to see the sunshine of our shared goal on the finish of the lengthy highway forward.