“Cazador de milagros” is a solo exhibition featuring the photographic practice of photojournalist Ricardo Alcaraz, curated by  Christopher Gregory-Rivera for the Museum of Contemporary Art [Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC)] in Santurce, Puerto Rico. The exhibition will be on view until July 26, 2026, at the Myrna Báez Hall at the MAC.

Description (MAC): The title of this exhibition, taken from a phrase by the writer Christian Ibarra, names something central to Ricardo Alcaraz’s practice: it is not the product of mere luck in being present, but rather the discipline of appearing, day after day, until the moment yields what it holds secret.

For the last five decades, Alcaraz has turned his lens toward music, dance, politics, social movements, and the small moments of daily life in Puerto Rico, always with a careful intimacy, resisting the extractive nature of photography through aesthetic compassion and presence.

Alcaraz began at the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico in the mid-seventies, contributing to the F.U.P.I. newspaper, Poder Estudiantil, first as a graphic artist and then as a photographer, after a scramble among the members of the collective to buy a secondhand Yashica rangefinder. The university gave him his first platform and shaped him both politically and photographically.

Throughout his professional career, he worked primarily for Diálogo, the University of Puerto Rico’s newspaper, and Claridad, the independent weekly. But his vast archive extends beyond his professional obligations, stemming from an unwavering personal commitment to documenting what is omitted from the dominant narrative. The result is a career defined not only by singular moments but by accumulation, a record whose historical weight and aesthetic depth are inseparable, each photograph enriched by the thousands surrounding it.

“Cazador de milagros” is more than a journey through fifty years of work.

Question: What does photographic memory require to survive?

Alongside Alcaraz’s photographs, the exhibition presents objects and materials from his home archive: the material infrastructure of a practice largely built outside of institutional support. Some prints in this show bear the marks of flooding: partially destroyed, their surfaces permanently transformed into something beautiful and heartbreaking that transcends mere damage. They are, in Ibarra’s words, images “marked by a deterioration that is also a metaphor for present-day Puerto Rico.” They are the traces of failed government institutions that actively degrade our collective memory.

They are also evidence. Evidence of the conditions under which collective visual memory persists in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean: precarious, self-managed, and irreplaceable.

Ricardo’s singular archive exists through his own efforts: cataloging, preserving, and protecting images that institutions have not prioritized. “Cazador de milagros” invites its visitors to see this invisible work not as the backdrop to the photographs, but as part of the work itself: the act of insisting that these images, and the lives they contain, deserve to be preserved and deserve to be seen.

Excerpts translated by Ivette Romero. For more information, see https://www.museomac.org/arte/exhibiciones/cazador-de-milagros-Ricardo-Alcaraz

Also read (in Spanish), https://claridadpuertorico.com/ricardo-alcaraz-diaz-un-verdadero-cazador-de-milagros/

[Shown above: 1) Ricardo Alcaraz’s “Desobediencia civil en Vieques” (1979); 2) “De camino a Lares”.]