22. The Bronx in Focus: The Visual Politics of En Foco, Inc.

Abstract

En Foco, Inc. and their work in communities of the South Bronx beginning in the early 1970s represent the first organized arts collective founded by Puerto Ricans dedicated to photography in New York City. As such, this chapter situates the emergence of En Foco, Inc. within the volatile history of the city in the period of “urban crisis’’ during the late twentieth century. It concurrently focuses on the space and place of the South Bronx as a site of print culture and the photographic production of alternative visions and practices of visibility of and for the New York Puerto Rican community at a time when social movements served as less cohesive categories for understanding the community’s relationship to the city, the state, and the island. My inquiry into the early history, aesthetics, and social art practices of En Foco, Inc. seeks to answer the question of how we understand the photographic and image-making practices by and about Latinx subjects in the absence of a coherent social movement, photography that dwells in the daily lives of people who do not enact the prototypical poses of protest and resistance for the lens from the vantage point of the South Bronx.