Collection

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.