Frank Espada

Francisco Luis Espada Roig (21 December 1930 – 16 February 2014) was an American photojournalist, photographer, activist, educator, and community organizer. Frank Espada founded East New York Action in the early 1960s.

Espada was born in 1930 in Utuado, Puerto Rico. His family migrated to New York City in 1939. He attended the public school system in East New York. After high school he attended college at City College of New York but he soon left without finishing up his studies, then he joined the United States Air Force during the American participation in the Korean War. Espada married his wife, Marilyn, in 1952.

Together they raised two boys and one girl: Jason, Lisa, and Martín. Under the G.I. Bill Espada was able to attend The New York Institute of Photography in New York City, where he learned and honed his craft of documentary photography. He studied under and was mentored directly by such significant role models as W. Eugene Smith as well as Dave Heath. To support his family he worked as an electrical contractor for ten years.

Espada was always drawn to and became involved in the civil rights movement prior to 1967 when he joined The City-Wide Puerto Rican Development Program, then under the direction of Manny Díaz. He worked as a community organizer in New York City’s most vulnerable and impoverished areas. Espada organized strikes against unfair rent increases, voter registration drives, sit-ins of welfare recipients and mothers, public school boycotts,marches for safer streets and civil and political rights, among many other expressions, during his tenure as an organizer. In 1979, Espada was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities which allowed him to focus his very keen and creative eye on documenting the struggle of Puerto Rican communities in the US. Espada had been active and involved with the National Welfare Rights Organization, the National Latino Media Coalition, the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, the National Hispanic Manpower Association, and the National Association of Puerto Rican Drug Abuse Programs.

In 1985, he moved his family to San Francisco.

Espada was, and is, renowned primarily as a documentary photographer. Although the sum of his many contributions are more than just one, Espada is best known for his book and his documentary photography project entitled The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People in which he exhibited his photography circa early-1960s to mid-1980s of the post-journey of the Puerto Rican people from their island home to their many new homes throughout the US (and the world at large).

Espada is known for his work in photography’s physical as well as its digital darkrooms. He became a teacher of photography working for University of California, Berkeley, Extension Program, in San Francisco. Under his tutelage, he launched many would-be students of photography into gallery-quality exhibiting photographers in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. He also taught photography and darkroom techniques at the Academy of Art University and the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition, Espada opened up his home to a legion of private students and mentees of all ages and persuasions who signed up for one-on-one to small invite-only groups of private seminars and private darkroom instruction, regularly meeting and working in his home darkroom and home living-dining rooms.

As an activist he was rarely silent: “We need to raise some holy hell,” he wrote. “For we have landed at the bottom and have stayed there.”

On the 109th Anniversary of the US Invasion of Puerto Rico, Espada with his then grown son, the acclaimed poet and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Martín Espada, appeared on a segment of “Democracy Now!” the daily, independent, global news hour with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

Working with Y.E.S., or Youth Environment Study founded by Harvey Feldman, Espada photographed and documented the devastating effect HIV/AIDS had wrought on the often-neglected and underserved population of people who abused drugs. Frank also photographed the physical beauty that surrounded him throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of Espada’s work, including some of his photographs and partial papers, 1946-2010, are now housed by the Duke University Libraries in their Rubenstein Library. The Library of Congress acquired an 83-print portfolio, and in 2010 Duke University Libraries acquired a selection of Espada's work, including over 200 finished prints, a portion of his papers, and material related to the Diaspora project.

• Frank Espada (1 January 2006). The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People. Frank Espada. pp. 5–. ISBN 978-0-9791247-1-6.