Picturing Portobelo is a project of Digital Portobelo: Art + Scholarship + Cultural Preservation, an interactive on-line collection of ethnographic interviews, photos, videos, art work, and archival material illuminating the rich culture and history of Portobelo, Panama founded by artist-scholar Renée Alexander Craft. The project showcases life in Portobelo, Panama through documentary photography. Portobelo, a small community located on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama, is best
known for its Spanish colonial heritage, its centuries old Black Christ festival, and an Afro-Latin community who call themselves and their cultural performance tradition “Congo.”
The website currently features photo essays that represent an ongoing collaboration between Alexander Craft and photographer Elaine Eversley. They are: The People of Portobelo, a portrait project honoring intergenerational community members, many of whom participate in the Congo tradition, and Congo Carnival, a narrative photoessay that documents the Congo tradition of Portobelo as it is enacted during Carnival Season.