Shooting Speculation: Gordon Parks and Puerto Rican Modernity

In 1949 Gordon Parks had just been hired as a full-time staff photographer for Life magazine. That auspicious year, his work was bookended by two projects that took him to Puerto Rico. These trips confronted Parks with two distinct faces, two distinct visions of Puerto Rican and Caribbean modernity that were being elaborated at the time. Shot on assignment for two articles published in January and December 1949, Untitled, Puerto Rico (inauguration of Luis Muñoz-Marín) and Gambling Woman, Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico were not printed and exhibited until the early 2000s, appearing together for the first time in the exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide at the National Gallery in Washington DC. Their overwrought subjects and metaphoric symbolism were incongruous with the laudatory tone of the articles for which they were shot: “A New Puerto Rico” and “Caribbean's Fanciest Hotel,” respectively. More than simply going beyond the strict editorial parameters of Life, these images are metonymic representations of the uncertain future faced by Puerto Ricans in 1949. Through a visual analysis of these works in relation to the Life articles, contemporaneous trends, and present-day scholarship, one can see how viewing Parks’ images as a diptych embodies a moment defined by speculation.