Guasábara
A sampling, as a teaser.
Guasábara is a word of Indigenous Antillean origin that survives in Puerto Rico with meanings of uprising, tumult and collective clamor. I use it as a working title, and I am still learning what it carries.
Landscapes made in Puerto Rico over three years, close in and with flash. The poet Rubén Ramos Colón is writing to the sequence now.
The walking ranged across the island’s distinct landscapes, from rain forest to dry forest, karst country and the outer islands: El Yunque National Forest, the Guánica Dry Forest, Río Abajo State Forest, the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge, Vieques and Culebra.
The photographs began in a struggle with landscape photography's inherited grammar of distance, hierarchy and resolution, descended from the Romantic and the picturesque. What photography had treated as noise, obstruction or compositional failure seemed to me capable of producing new knowledge. I moved close and used flash, and began to see currents, repetitions, crossings and flows inside what first looked like disorder. Wildness appeared not as the absence of structure but as a living structure that exceeds the frame.
The elevated view of the landowner turns a living world into property, crops, boundaries and yield, and names whatever resists cultivation maleza: scrub, waste. Agricultural and colonial systems joined the control of land to the control of people. Another energy remains in the land, one that crosses boundaries, adapts, returns and continues without submitting to a single plan. Its power is measured not by profit or extraction but by continuation.
The photographs do not make the land a symbol. They stay with what can be seen: forms crossing, repeating, disappearing and returning, an order that becomes perceptible without becoming fully legible. Puerto Rico's histories of extraction, enclosure and refusal are present as pressure rather than illustration.
Thirty-five photographs, drawn from some 2,500, now hold the sequence. Rubén Ramos Colón is writing into it, and what he writes may change its order. The images refuse to behave, and the language beside them need not either.