Disguised is a photographic project documenting a Halloween celebration in Santurce, Puerto Rico, organized by an LGBTQ+ bar as a gathering place for a community to celebrate identity, freedom, and self-expression. Over the course of five years, I photographed the streets and nightlife surrounding this celebration, using direct flash to capture the costumes, gestures, faces, and personas that emerged from the darkness.
Halloween offers a temporary space in which identity can be transformed, exaggerated, concealed, or reinvented. Behind masks, elaborate costumes, makeup, and theatrical appearances, people are given permission to become someone else—or perhaps to express parts of themselves that everyday social expectations compel them to suppress. In this setting, the celebration becomes more than a party. It becomes an act of collective freedom, a place where difference is not merely tolerated but actively performed and celebrated.
Yet a contradiction lies at the heart of this freedom: why must one disguise oneself to feel free to be oneself? What does it mean to find liberation through concealment, particularly within communities whose identities and expressions have historically been marginalized?
My photographs explore this tension between visibility and disguise. Working on the street with the immediacy of a flash snapshot, I interrupt the darkness to reveal the extraordinary details of each persona. The harsh light isolates faces and costumes from their surroundings, transforming fleeting encounters into theatrical moments suspended between documentation and performance. The darkness becomes both the physical setting of the celebration and a metaphor for the social conditions against which these expressions of identity emerge.
Rather than treating disguise as an escape from reality, Disguised considers it a way of negotiating reality. The costumes offer protection, play, transformation, and the possibility of self-invention. They expose the unstable boundaries between who we are, who we are expected to be, and who we dare to become when given the opportunity.
Ultimately, Disguised is a portrait of a community claiming space for itself. It asks whether freedom should require a mask, while recognizing the power of a collective gathering in which, for one night, the act of becoming someone else might make it possible to be more fully oneself.
