Puente del ferrocarril sobre el Rio de La Plata cerca de Dorado, Puerto Rico
Date 1946
Dimensions 7"x 7"
Category Photography
Medium Silver salts, in a suspension of gelatin on paper print
Genre Scenes
Period 20th Century
Collection * Title Translation: Railroad bridge across the Rio de La Plata near Dorado, Puerto Rico

Jack Delano

"Puente del ferrocarril sobre el Rio de La Plata cerca de Dorado, Puerto Rico* " (1946)

Description

Biography

Photographer, filmmaker, graphic designer, illustrator, and composer. Delano’s family came to Philadelphia in 1923 after fleeing the chaos of the Russian Revolution in 1917. He studied music at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and later studied illustration and design at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he received a grant to travel to Europe. There, he became interested in photography, and when he returned to Philadelphia he was hired by the Federal Art Project, the arts division of the Works Progress Administration. Master photographer Paul Strand saw an exhibition of Delano’s photographs and urged him to move to New York, where he met Irene (soon to be his wife), with whom he traveled, eventually, in 1941, to Puerto Rico for a documentary project with the Farm Security Administration, which had hired him on Roy Stryker’s recommendation. In 1946 he settled on the island definitively. His great contribution to art in Puerto Rico occurred when he took part in the organization of the Cinema and Graphics Unit (CGU) of the Commission of Parks and Recreation (the CGU later becoming the Division of Community Education); he was ever-active in producing documentaries, films, and photographs, and took part in the island’s first years of television and radio. In the late eighties, the Smithsonian Institution published a book of his photographs titled Puerto Rico Mio: Four Decades of Change.