Frank Espada

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Francisco Luis Espada Roig (b. 1930-2014) was a lifelong community organizer, activist, and documentary photographer known for capturing the lives of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Mentored by renowned photographers Eugene Smith and David Heath, Espada developed a photographic ethical imperative that led him to document the lives of colonized, oppressed, and otherwise ignored people through a combination of photographs and oral histories. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Espada was a community organizer, activist, and photographed events of those times, sharing space with leaders such as Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin. Espada went on to establish the organization East New York Action, served as the chair of both the Welfare Recipients League and ASPIRA, became the vice president of the Urban Coalition, and helped to establish the Black Independent Voters initiative. His decades of activist work served to keep alive his dreams of being a politically invested and community accountable artist.