A Young Photographer’s Intimate Chronicle of Family in El Salvador and the United States

I don’t have any pictures of my family in my home. My spouse has a photograph of us and our dog, on our bookcase, I think. I don’t keep images of my parents or brother on my phone. Pictures of family are a source of terror for me because they remind me of the people I love too much, and the people I love are the most vulnerable beings I know. I am an artist and can only ease their suffering so much.

Adelante (2018–ongoing), a series by Steven Molina Contreras, who was born in El Salvador in 1999 and grew up on Long Island, chronicles his jumping-bean dynamics with his family—his mother, father, stepfather, grandparents, sisters. The images are hard to look at because so much is familiar in them. His father’s and stepfather’s hands look like mine—dark brown, thick fingers, neatly trimmed fingernails. But Molina Contreras doesn’t make hands his focus, unlike many photographers who document migrant men. He is curious about the men in his life, he asks them to reveal everything they have to show. As always, our parents tell us some things, lie out of love or self-preservation.

His mother, Alma, is a fantastic source of theater. She recently got her degree in ministry at a school on Long Island, Molina Contreras tells me. Sometimes she puts on her blazer and preaches on Instagram Live, even to an audience of three. Women in evangelical traditions have a familiar stage presence—a straight back, a straightening of the spine they inspire in others—and she has it in Nuestro Corazón and Abigail’s Portrait. Alma is the matriarch, posing like Tina Knowles, accepting our gratitude for giving us the artist, acknowledging her own artistic direction. She picked out her clothing, she focuses her gaze, meeting our own. Our moms’ image is always picked out. When they are working hard to make a living, they pick out clothes to feel themselves fully to be working hard to make a living. Molina Contreras’s photographs don’t pretend to return dignity to his family, or to restore broken bonds, none of that. They reveal a family’s theater of family, and a loving family’s meticulousness in their love for each other, how that fussiness is sometimes embodied in artifice or even clutter.

A certain romance of the subject is inherent to portraiture. In Adelante, Molina Contreras showcases a family I love the way you can only love a family you encounter solely through image or text. These photographs are beautiful to me. They don’t cause me pain. But they do give me hope because they all seem to be taken in the tender moment of ongoing forgiveness. In one picture from El Salvador, the artist’s younger sister Amy, whom he has only seen for a total of three weeks in their lives, looks at him searchingly, hungrily, angrily, and her portrait seems like an offering. Molina Contreras is immortalizing her with his gift, and maybe that counts for something. We see the exaltation of generations of sacrifice in Mujeres Celestiales, a portrait of the women in his family—his older sister, little sister, mother, and grandmother. Matriarchy is important to the artist. The women sit in a white bed with a frilly white frame against a white wall, daring the viewer, or anybody, to divide them again.

Photographs we take on our phones might be too much to bear, the texts we send to our families gnaw at immediate needs. But these photographs, made with patience and taken as part of an ongoing collection of curated images of family, borders, possessions, and belonging, are art. Those of us with hurt and gifts know what it is to bring them to the table to capture something that would otherwise be forgotten. The lucky ones can save what’s lost.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 245, “Latinx,” under the title “Adelante.”