Since the beginning of his career in the 1970s Méndez Caratini has been a key figure in the field of photography in his native Puerto Rico. Decade after decade, through photographic essays that include Tradiciones: Album de la puertorriqueñidad/ Traditions: Album of Puertoricanness (1974-1989) Petroglifos de Boriquén/ Petroglyphs of Boriquén (1975-1995), Loiza: Herencia negra/ Loíza: Black Heritage (1975-1996), and Buscando Milagros/ Looking for Miracles (1979-1988), among many others, Méndez Caratini has focused his eye and camera on cultural expressions of Puerto Rican identity. From the ancestral petroglyphs of Indigenous Taínos, to folkloric traditions such as the carnivals of the towns of Loíza, Ponce, and Hatillo with their masked and costumed characters, to the rituals of religious catholic and Afro-descendant communities, Méndez Caratini harnessed the indexical power of photography to point to the island’s specificity. Beyond the technical excellence of his work, apparent in qualities such as the crispness of his silver gelatin prints, and the vividness of his color photographs, Méndez Caratini’s compositions display a profound reverence for the subjects he chooses to photograph, for example, shooting slightly from below the stone-chiseled icon of Caguana to convey her divine status as the Taíno goddess of fertility, or closing in on the crowd of people demanding the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners to suggest the multitudinous power of their protest.
In an island that has been under foreign sovereignty for 515 years (from 1508 to 1898 under Spain, and since then under the United States), Puerto Rican culture and identity are in a perpetual process of being simultaneously shaped, challenged, threatened by foreign interests who value the island economically and geographically, rather than culturally. Deeply anchored in this context, Méndez Caratini’s work is a humanist gesture to recognize the Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and Spanish substrate of Puerto Rican identity, and to show how the cultural expressions yielded by that mix persist against the odds and against the specter of transculturation.
However, although these are the most recognized aspects of Méndez Caratini’s work on the island, the thematic variety of his half-a-century career and the many expressions of his commitment to the field through teaching and through his affiliation to a variety of photographic organizations exceed by far what these two pages can contain. The inclusion of his work in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the International Center of Photography, and El Museo del Barrio speaks to the institutional recognition of his craft.
Another aspect of his work focuses on Latin American and the Caribbean, and including bodies of work such as Incas (1974), and Raíces ancestrales en el Nuevo Mundo / Ancestral Roots in the New World. These bodies of work, paired with Méndez Caratini’s his involvement in photographic organizations such as Consejo Latinoamericano de Fotografía (founding member in Mexico, 1978), the Asociación Fotográfica de Puerto Rico (1976), and as director of Consejo Puertorriqueño de Fotografía (1990-1998) have helped establish the importance of the medium of photography in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Furthermore, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Latino Center in 2003, he directed his lens towards US Latino leaders in a series that traveled the country under the title Our Journeys/ Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement.
His quest to understand the human search for spirituality has taken Méndez Caratini also to India, Himalaya, Cambodia, Bhutan, and Japan, where he has produced bodies of work that shine a light on Hindu and Buddhist philosophies and practices, through photographs of landscapes, temples, religious festivals, and people practicing rituals. In 2024, this exploration will be expanded into the study of religions in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt and Jordan.
Coming from an island with very limited funding for art, Méndez Caratini has financed the majority of his artistic endeavors through his profession as an ophthalmic photographer working for the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Medicine. In that capacity, he has also been a leader, participating in landmark investigations conducted at the National Eye Institute, the Joslin Diabetic Center, Boston, and Puerto Rico’s School of Medicine to further the study of retinal pathologies caused by diabetes. This scientific facet of his work has provided Méndez Caratini with research principles that he has applied to his artistic work.
Méndez Caratini’s impressive variety of work, and this trajectory, from the national to the global, will be on display at his fifty year retrospective Redux, to be held at the Museo de Las Américas in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Given the shortage of resources in Puerto Rico, which has been undergoing a deep financial crisis since 2014, a Guggenheim Fellowship is essential to be able to afford the production costs, from printing, framing, and art handling. I am thankful to you for your keen consideration of his candidacy.