In 1992, upon completing my BFA, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Donis A. Dondis Foundation to spend six months in the Dominican Republic. It was my first opportunity outside of an academic setting to create a long-term project. At the time, I was deeply influenced by the work of FSA photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Jack Delano, and I sought to emulate their style and methodology. Armed with a Speed Graphic camera and ten film holders each day, I traveled across the country documenting its people and landscapes.

My connection to the Dominican Republic, however, reached further back. As a child in the early 1970s, I would visit my father while he worked there in the garment industry. Those early impressions gave me a perspective on the country’s social realities in the aftermath of the Trujillo dictatorship and offered me a frame of reference that resonated with the Puerto Rico of my grandparents thirty years earlier. This project became not only a breakthrough photographic journey but also a personal exploration of history, memory, and cultural continuity.