It is with a heavy heart that I commemorate Hiram Maristany’s passing today.1 I arrived at photography not through the arts but through history. I was studying the Young Lords in college when I came across Hiram’s work in El Barrio. I was fascinated with the idea that the Young Lords had a photographer in their cadre.2 Looking back, my curiosity surrounding the role of photography in the Young Lords organization created an opportunity for me to theorize about the power and possibilities of the photographic medium.
That summer, working as a research fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican studies on my own Young Lords project surrounding the role of women in the movement, I was surrounded by Miguel Luciano’s public art project: Mapping Resistance. The project enlarged and staged Hiram’s photographs of El Barrio at the same locations they took place 50 years before.
I am drawn to photography for the same reasons that I am drawn to history. As a minoritized person in the U.S., my own understanding of who or what I am has been shaped by multiple and discordant histories. Where do I belong? What is my place? These are the questions I grapple with. But in the absence of written histories, how do photographs speak for us? For me, Hiram’s work is a link to a past that imagines a future for myself and for my community. It proclaims: we are here! the sky is the limit!
With the passing of yet another legendary Latinx photographer, I am reminded that we must not wait to honor those who inspire us. That we must fight to celebrate and recognize their work while they are amongst us. There were many who preserved and celebrated Hiram’s work while he was still with us, we owe much to Evelyn Carmen Ramos at the Smithsonian for these efforts, may they inspire our own, however big or small.
Read
What Hiram Maristany Saw Looking Through The Lens At El Barrio in NPR
See
Anchor: An Exhibition Centered on the Photography of Hiram Maristany at Hunter East Harlem Gallery
“Hiram Maristany, Young Lords Photographer Who Lovingly Turned His Lens on El Barrio, Dies at 76,” Art News, March 11, 2022.
Neyda Martinez Sierra, “Past is Present: The Young Lords Party Revisited,” The Latinx Project Intervenxiones.