Ángel “The Journeyman” Morales: A Photojournalist’s View of Puerto Rican Chicago

Opened: April 2016

This exhibition celebrated the work of Puerto Rican photojournalist Ángel R. Morales—known as The Journeyman—whose lens chronicled the Puerto Rican community in Chicago during the late twentieth century. His photographs offered a visual journey through parades, political demonstrations, family life, and neighborhood traditions, capturing both the struggles and triumphs of a community building its place in the city.

The curatorial frame emphasized Morales’s personal proximity to the people he photographed. Working with analog cameras and the discipline of news photography, he created images that are at once urgent and intimate. The exhibition foregrounded composition, vantage point, and sequencing to show how Morales told complex stories in single frames—stories of pride, protest, and everyday life. Context panels paired images with short community recollections gathered through El Archivo, inviting viewers to see the photographs as both art and testimony.

By centering a community photojournalist, PRAA highlighted photography’s power to correct the historical record and expand who is recognized as an author of Chicago history. The show helped set a course for subsequent documentary projects that draw from community photographers and family albums to build a fuller public memory.

Positioned between El Archivo (2014) and Faces of Puerto Rican Migration (2019), the exhibition advanced PRAA’s archival mission and set the stage for the upcoming Carlos Flores: A ChicagoRican Story (2026).