September 20, 2017. A category four on its entry, and a possible category five as it cut a path across the center of the Island, Hurricane Maria traversed Puerto Rico along a devastating diagonal, thus engulfing the entire Island. Not a single corner of Puerto Rico was spared its pulverizing onslaught. Some were, however, more affected than others, and for different reasons. One of them was the municipality of Maricao, locally known as the “Pueblo de las Indieras,” nestled within the Central Cordillera in the center-west of the island.

The subject of her second solo exhibition was not easily approached by the photojournalist and cultural manager Yadira Hernández-Picó, who spent her childhood in Maricao. The photographic subjects captured through her viewfinder are human beings, but they are also former neighbors and, in a particular case, a parent. The other photographic subjects are environments, of course, but they are also located in adjacent neighborhoods, made up of people who generally knew each other.

Like everyone who lived through this catastrophe, the photojournalist had to face what lay or remained just outside her door. It can be said that Puerto Rico continues to experience its second hurricane—the slow recovery from the ravages of Maria.

Later, Hernández-Picó set out by car on an epic journey to the mountainous municipality that normally would have taken her about two hours; this time it took her eight. Her “homecoming,” ancient topos of literature and more broadly in cultural production, became a “home search,” since Maria’s passage had re-mapped her entire childhood town. With roads impassable because of debris and landslides, the new Maricao was unrecognizable, meaning that a purebred Maricaeña was forced to ask passersby for basic directions as if she were a tourist: Which road was she driving on, and how could she get to her former neighborhood? When she finally “came home”, what she encountered should not be for me to reveal, out of discretion. But perhaps this exhibition offers a glimpse of that experience.

The exhibition is inserted in the genre of the visual narrative, which combines chronicle and photography. The story also integrates the well-known journalistic scheme of content triangulation. The photographs evoke the sub-genre of social documentary photography, and in this case, natural disaster photography. But there is more. They deliberately and creatively appropriate the sub-genre of vernacular photography, in the instances in which human beings are seen in their attempts to resume their former daily lives. They are shown posing frontally for the camera, amid the ruins, rubble, and ravaged landscapes, retrieving or rearranging belongings, going about timeworn chores.

From now on, as always, yes, but under a new “blue roof”: implying either the newly uncovered daytime sky or the also-blue waterproof tarps sent—with alarming sluggishness—by a dependency on the U.S. federal government. You can set out on your bike, of course, but into what used to be a neighborhood and is now a vacant lot, a desolate barrio. (Everything seems “burned,” says one interviewee.) The old homes are suddenly “reformulated”: What used to be the outside of the house, is now an interior-exterior, invaded by nature. The subsequent abode, like on some checkerboard, operates within new boundaries. The backyard of yesteryear is the current living room-patio; yesterday’s bedroom is today’s storage area. “… Things over there,” another interviewee refers to as if there were a border, to indicate what is no longer here, despite the fact that those “things over there” are still within the domestic space.

And with this sort of “open house”, an “open country” also arrives and departs—mass migration. They move to near and far away, mainly to the mainland U.S. The idea of “going back home” hangs in the air, as if in the future there might be the possibility of a definitive return, a set annual vacation, or an occasional bit of Christmas nostalgia, but with no real intention of returning to reside in their homeland, where they were so happy, or whether it will simply be, ultimately, a dream that is impossible to fulfill. It is the current dialectic of the house that was/ the house that is; the house that will be/the house that will never be. It is not just another home that remains after the devastation; it is another Puerto Rico. Maybe another Puerto Rico-world.

With the photos that she took of her fellow townspeople and her mother between September and November 2017, Hernández-Picó’s viewfinder cannot help but remain fully implicated. Gone is that secure and reassuring distance offered by a mechanical device. Even without the resource of the text, the images still manage to impart a flustered space beyond the frame, the intimate extra-visual world: Are you okay? Can I do something for you?

The photographic subject is enveloping, all-encompassing, and its intended “objectivity” is apparent. The internal space evoked by the image, from the world of experience, is absolute. The sound of the broom, packing, and moving to other places, is painfully audible.

But the image captures other details at the same time: It draws attention, despite everything, to the will to persevere at any cost, to remain standing, evidenced by the Maricaeños. Perhaps this is why the image insists, broadly speaking, on the general plane, the level frame, the right angle or slightly low angle, the average height; the composition with depth of field that combines figure, house-ruin, and landscape-sky; the high chromatic tonal values, highlighting the epic of daily survival, with a dignified, almost martial air. However, with the figure decentralized at times, the focal point is not always the human being: There are forces at play here that are greater than the human. Overcast skies or a mysterious blue radiance, implying either some glorious hope or some ominous portent.

This exhibition, and the event it focuses on, provide a searing spotlight and then a call to action. Leagues away from the iconic documentary photos of Puerto Rico’s rural sectors made in the 1940s, and the current predominance of the urban chronicle on the island, Hernández-Picó makes her own contribution with a kind of art-action, visual narrative, and act, which, like the Baroque Flemish genre painters, captures another extimacy: the interlinings—or underpinnings?—of a new country-world.

(Translation from Spanish by David Auerbach)