Private Story
Archive of loss and life
This year will be the fifth anniversary and there is still no exact number on the death toll of the island. Studies have fluctuated between 2000-5000 deaths and in Puerto Rico there is a general consensus that 4645 is the approximate toll.
Similar to my personal project, Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar, about my father's death in the aftermath of the hurricane, my intention with this story is to put human faces and stories on the infamous death toll. I intend to work with at least five families and photograph the belongings of their late loved ones and portraits of the remaining family members, creating both an archive of loss and life.
The principal causes of death in the aftermath of Hurricane María are accidents, heart failure, diabetes, and suicide. Many of these deaths, however, could have been prevented if access to electricity, water, and basic services would have been provided sooner or if the government had an organized response to the emergency. I'm looking to include a range of experiences of loss, including those who were unable to clarify the cause of death and those that died because of access to resources.
I envision the images to be a collection of objects of the deceased (clothes, notebooks, jewelry, cds, etc) paired with immersive documentary portraiture of the remaining family members.
I'm conceptualizing these objects like an archive. Photographing this archive of "what remains" I believe dialogues directly with the scandal that surrounded the death toll and the protests that followed. In the first eight months of the hurricane the government kept its official death toll at 64 while on the street people protested that the toll was a lot higher. When the Harvard study that estimated approximately 4645 excess deaths published families set up an impromptu memorial in front of the Capitol of Puerto Rico leaving behind the shoes of their late loved ones.
Jumping off my own work with my father's story I'm questioning: why keep these objects? What do they mean today? Each of these objects has a story/memory to be told.
In the portraiture of the family members I'm interested in documenting life after loss and going beyond the disaster/resilience narrative. I'm hoping to capture how, in spite of this loss, these narratives are carried forward and live. Some questions that might help frame the image are: Are there rituals of remembering the deceased? Does a family member now use their late loved ones' clothes?
The essence of what I am looking to photograph is that we are able to continue living because we remember and we have evidence that these people were part of our lives.
