Adál Alberto Maldonado (November 1, 1948December 9, 2020), styled as ADÁL, was a photographer who lived and worked in New York City and Puerto Rico. Primarily a

portrait photographer Portrait photography, or portraiture, is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait photograph may be artistic or clinical. Frequentl ...

, his works focused on the concept of

identity Identity may refer to: * Identity document * Identity (philosophy) * Identity (social science) * Identity (mathematics) Arts and entertainment Film and television * ''Identity'' (1987 film), an Iranian film * ''Identity'' (2003 film), an ...

. He also worked on musical performances and installations. Maldonado is associated with the Nuyorican movement. Maldonado was born in

Utuado, Puerto Rico Utuado () is a Utuado barrio-pueblo, town and Municipalities of Puerto Rico, municipality of Puerto Rico located in the central mountainous region of the island known as the ''Cordillera Central (Puerto Rico), Cordillera Central''. It is located ...

, on November 1, 1948. His family moved to

Trenton, New Jersey Trenton is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of New Jersey and the county seat of Mercer County, New Jersey, Mercer County. It was the federal capital, capital of the United States from November 1 until D ...

, when he was 13, and then to

the Bronx The Bronx ( ) is the northernmost of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. It shares a land border with Westchester County, New York, West ...

when he was 17. Among Maldonado's works is a mixed-media installation and website titled ''El Puerto Rican Embassy'' (1994), developed in collaboration with Pedro Pietri. (According to Acosta-Belén and Santiago, the concept is due to Eduardo Figueroa.) For the project, Maldonado and Pietri created a Puerto Rican

passport A passport is an official travel document issued by a government that certifies a person's identity and nationality for international travel. A passport allows its bearer to enter and temporarily reside in a foreign country, access local aid ...

and named ambassadors for Puerto Rico. In another work titled ''Coconauts in Space'' (2016-2020) he used NASA archives to re-imagine the 1969 Apollo moon landing with a Puerto Rican protagonist.

Publications

References

1948 births 2020 deaths 20th-century American photographers 21st-century American photographers People from Trenton, New Jersey People from Utuado, Puerto Rico {{US-photographer-stub