(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- To travel across Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria is to confront a ceaseless succession of images that surprise, discourage, unnerve, and inspire—sometimes all at once. Splintered trunks, tangled wires, and twisted metal sheeting are ever-present backgrounds. Yet the human gestures you see playing out against all that destruction jump to the fore: a man bending low to drink water from a roadside pipe; a pedestrian pausing to direct traffic under a broken stoplight; parents on a block without power connecting a video projector to a car battery, then screening a Disney movie against a brick wall for the neighborhood kids.
Photographer John Francis Peters traveled across Puerto Rico in October and November, and his pictures reveal a recovery that sometimes seems as if it’s progressing in super-slow motion, one frame at a time. —Monte Reel
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Ferrara at dferrara5@bloomberg.net.
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