Jack Delano por Lilliana Aleman

In a section of the book Puerto Rico Mío, its author, the photographer, painter, musician, and composer, Jack Delano, mentions the story about a fourteen-year-old boy who writes from El Paso, Texas, asking him for his autograph. Delano answers the boy’s letter, and asked him “What is it that you like about the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) pictures?” The boy replied, “I like the pictures because they make ordinary people important”.

Jack Delano, Russian born and raised in Pennsylvania, United States, started working as a photographer for the Photography Program of the FSA in 1940. The FSA was created in 1935 as part of the New Deal to battle rural poverty. Jack and Irene Delano came to Puerto Rico for the first time in 1941 to photograph the depressed areas of Puerto Rico. Even when the FSA ceased its work in 1944, the Delanos continued their labor. They came back to Puerto Rico in 1979 and not only did they capture images that a few people thought were unimportant, he also composed two songs performed for the first time by El Coro de Niños de San Juan, and published four books.

A genius is one who can see what everyone else ignores, and translates it into a representation that the rest of us can see through his or her gaze. Just as Auguste Renoir saw beauty in the everyday routine of the French aristocracy of the 19^th century, Jack Delano could see the beauty and value of the workers and the average Puerto Ricans that inhabited this Island from 1941 until 1989. That is the value of the documentary photography; it might not be news, but it will become a valuable item when the represented scenes become unimaginable.

One could say that the foreigner’s eye finds something new everywhere it lays its gaze upon, but Jack Delano and his wife Irene, kept documenting Puerto Rico’s daily life even when they established themselves in 1979. There is a beauty that goes beyond the scenes captured by Delano’s lens which is the reaction evoked by seeing what everything in this Island used to be. The tractor replaced the ox and the young faces are no longer concealed by the severity of a life in which those who did not work did not eat. Sometimes, it is just delightfully surprising to see that some places are untouched.

It was a courageous move every time Irene Delano had to ask for permission to intrude in people’s lives just to freeze that moment in time. However, there is a lot of humility in the simple fact that the Delanos found a humble face, a woman cooking in her rugged wooden kitchen, and workers eating their lunch worthy of their lens. Jack and Irene Delano taught us that the sight of workers fixing the road, the landscapes we see on the countryside, children on their way from school, and the façade of the local bakery can become a treasure for generations to come.