When photographer Pablo Delano arrived in Hartford in 1996 to teach at Trinity College, he heard the stories.
People told him: “Hartford’s dangerous, it’s boring, the only worthwhile part is it’s halfway between Boston and New York,” said Delano. “Then a friend took me to Park Street, and I saw the stories were not true. This is a different kind of diversity than New York, where I’d been living. It’s all together, Peruvians, Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, all together. There’s a Spanish word that describes this ability to negotiate a space where you can all live together, convivencia.”
Over the next 10 years, Delano taught at Trinity — where he’s now chair of the Department of Fine Arts — all the while completing photographic projects about Trinidad and Cambodia on the side. Then, a subject came to him: Hartford.
“I suddenly had this drive to make photographs of where I lived,” said Delano, who grew up in Puerto Rico, the son of the great FSA photographer Jack Delano. “Around 2008, I wondered if I could do it in a serious, concerted way.”
The result is “Hartford Seen,” a startling exhibition of 126 large color prints on view at the Connecticut Historical Society. “Hartford Seen” is part document, part visual poetry and all heart. Delano is not creating a Chamber of Commerce image of, or for, Hartford. He is presenting the city as it is now, in the early 21st century. Hartford with all its joys and sorrow, vibrancy and decrepitude, hustle bustle, oil and ice. The latter two (“OIL ICE”) can be found on a sign in one of Delano’s photographs.
“It’s the story of the city as a two word poem, isn’t it?” Delano says, laughing.
He points to a photograph of a barber shop wedged into the ground floor of a brownstone, and another of a barber shop where the proprietor painted barber poles on the bricks on either side of the front door.
“You see? A different sense of aesthetics has come here with each wave of immigrants and they are transforming the city,” he said. “It’s part of a historical process … buildings abandoned, stores out of business next to stores about to open and shops that are thriving.”
He points to photographs of makeshift storefront churches now operating out of buildings that were once synagogues. The larger point he’s making is that all these places will eventually be gone, and these may be the only visual record of their existence.
“That’s the nature of documentary work, that it will be here after we’re gone,” he said.
The show is roughly divided into utilitarian sections: Civic Hartford, includes shots of government buildings, insurance headquarters, museums, fire houses, post offices; Enterprising Hartford, the most colorful section, is a kaleidoscope of pizza joints, bodegas, hair salons, bug exterminators, furniture stores, laundromats, a Bank of America branch next door to the “Temple of God Miracles of Deliverance Church”; Residential Hartford includes examples of the “Perfect Six,” six apartments on three floors with a shared central staircase, unique to the city; Places of Worship, include everything from synagogues to homes with Hindu prayer flags and a Russian Orthodox church seen from the back yard of a neighbor.
“My primary motivation was let me see if I can make a body of work out of the city for which I have admiration for the architecture and the resourcefulness of the people. Beyond that, a core of photographs like this could be used to counteract that negative view of Hartford.”
Since the exhibit is on view until March, there’s plenty of time for every resident of Hartford and everyone who even occasionally visits the city, to see this place through new eyes.
HARTFORD SEEN: PHOTOGRAPHS BY PABLO DELANO is on view through March 14, 2015. Connecticut Historical Society, 1 Elizabeth St., Hartford, 860-236-5621, chs.org
