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  • The Optical Revolution of ADÁL’s Los Out of Focus Nuyoricans
  • Matthew David Goodwin (bio)

ADÁL’s Los Out of Focus Nuyoricans (1996) is a series of twenty out-of-focus, black-and-white photographic portraits of Puerto Rican artists, activists, and community members. The portraits, along with Reverendo Pedro Pietri’s essay-poem “Nuyoricans Out of Focus” (1996), were first exhibited as a series at New York’s El Museo del Barrio in 1996. In 2004 and 2005, the series was exhibited at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, which resulted in a companion booklet that brought together fourteen of these photos and the essay-poem.

Adál Alberto Maldonado was born in 1948 in Utuado, Puerto Rico. He came to the United States in his youth and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute where he met the photographer Lisette Model, who baptized him ADÁL in the spirit of surrealist artists such as Brassaï. He spent much of his career in the Puerto Rican art community in New York, working primarily in photography but also in theater, installation art, and prose fiction. In 2010, he returned to Puerto Rico where he continues his art practice, often collaborating with other artists and scholars.

Los Out of Focus Nuyoricans is one segment of ADÁL’s larger installation Los Blueprints for a Nation (1994-2013). This installation displays artifacts from the conceptual nation El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico, a politically charged nation in the vein of the Chicano nation Aztlán. The governing center of this nation is not a White House but El Puerto Rican Embassy, which ADÁL and Pietri established in 1994 as an official space of cultural and political resistance where one is “empowered through one’s own creative intentions” (ADÁL). The Puerto Rican Embassy is meant to elevate the position of Puerto Rico from colony to equal nation—since only sovereign nations direct embassies. The out-of-focus Nuyoricans serve as ambassadors of the Embassy.

One of the key artifacts of the nation is El Passport (1995), a Puerto Rican passport modeled after the traditional United States passport but bearing images associated with Puerto Rico such as dominos and roosters. The full dimensionality of El Passport was realized through live-performance productions of [End Page 153] passports, in which ADÁL personalized passports with the biographical data and passport photos of those attending. During the period that ADÁL was taking these passport photos, he was also reading Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). Inspired by Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility, ADÁL began to take the passport photos out of focus, reflecting invisibility back into the camera in order to adapt it to his view of the Nuyorican experience.


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Figure 1.

ADÁL, “ADÁL” from Los Out of Focus Nuyoricans (1996), computer-generated portrait. Image courtesy: ADÁL.

In Los Out of Focus Nuyoricans, ADÁL developed a new visual metaphor, one that takes advantage of the capabilities of the camera: one can photographically point to invisibility, but by definition one cannot photograph it. In this photo series, the out-of-focus is a visual metaphor for being unrecognized in the mainstream cultures of both the United States and Puerto Rico. Marked by race and language, Puerto Ricans are often seen as foreign immigrants, even though they [End Page 154] are citizens of the United States. At the same time, as a diaspora group that has left the island, Nuyoricans are at times distanced from Puerto Rican culture on the island and so form a significantly different culture. In addition to depicting social exclusion, the out-of-focus has an empowering significance. Since being out of focus shares an aesthetic quality with being mixed, it is a way to evoke the rich hybrid culture of Puerto Ricans living in the United States. The photo series is not meant to depict a group of people trying to get “in focus” by resolving their social and existential situation. Such a resolution would mean assimilating completely into US society or living completely in nostalgia for the island. Instead, the...

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