Erika P. Rodriguez: “Until the Stars Collapse” by Tonya Ingram

Ms. Rodriguez, a freelance photographer who covers Puerto Rico for The New York Times, “searched for something else” in familiar places.

When I first read the poem, I felt like it was both a reminder and permission to see the beauty in life, something I feel I had forgotten after covering and living the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The disaster left me in some ways hopeless. I felt it was a permission to accept that nothing is perfect, that life is made by experiences of love and of hurt, but that it is important to live it — to feel it and to remember that we are all “a working title.”

I went to photograph familiar places where I usually look for images that speak to the economic crisis or the disaster, and I searched for something else. I wanted to avoid repeating the visuals that have become the representation of my homeland in the past years. We are more than the crisis.

I photographed the ocean with a little palm tree in the corner. I come from three generations of people from islands — in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Spain. The ocean is part of who I am. I photographed in Old San Juan, searching for daily moments and color, life. I photographed in Cayey, the town where my family is from. And I photographed my grandmother, because life is deeply connected to ancestry and the experiences of love and hurt by those that came before me. She did not want to have her photo taken because she had not dyed her hair and she said did not look “beautiful” — so I photographed her hidden white hair, her years, her wisdom.

In Comerío, a town affected by the storm, I photographed the remnants, the life, the faith, the hope, a hammock in an unconventional place that seemed like a beautiful place to rest. The floor base of what was once someone’s home and was taken by Maria last September. An image of Christ placed outside, near a big Puerto Rican flag painted on a rock.

It was, personally, a challenge to say: How can I photograph there places that have formed me with the core of what I felt from the poem in mind — that sense of life and complexity of being?

I put the poem in the lock screen of my phone for the days I was shooting, so I was constantly thinking about it. I think it changed as I went out to shoot and gave myself permission to see my surroundings with more care and love, and with less pain and hopelessness.