First, he was a painter, working on pieces that were witty and intellectual and full of inside jokes.

Delano used 3-D objects, incorporating them into a piece and painting the shadows they cast on the surface. "A sort of challenge to the 2-D or `illusionistic,' " he says. "You know, intellectual games."

Games that led him to the realization that he was making art for art's sake, and being intellectual just for the sake of being intellectual. And those inside jokes, they were neither as funny nor as fulfilling as they once were.

It was a slow realization, this feeling that the paintings did not ring true to him, that they were full of theatrics, that they lacked soul. But when he felt it, he knew he had to do something else, something real.

He took a job teaching art to children at an after-school program in New York City's Lower East Side: mostly Puerto Rican kids from the neighborhood. The program was funded through grants, so to keep his job, and to keep the money coming in, Delano brought in a camera to document the art he helped the kids create.

He pointed the camera first at the artwork, but it didn't take long before he pointed it higher - first at the kids holding their artwork, then of just the kids, then the kids and their families, until he started photographing the Latino experience all around him.

He hadn't noticed it right away, but teaching those kids, kids that looked and talked like the kids he grew up with in Puerto Rico, like the kid he was in Puerto Rico, made him realize how much he had missed it all. In a lot of ways, being in that classroom, taking pictures, brought him home again.

He's reluctant to say he followed in his father's footsteps. It's too neat, too cliché, not exactly right, Pablo says. His father, Jack Delano, was a renowned photographer with the New Deal's Farm Security Administration who documented some of the most important pictures of Puerto Rico in the 1940s and 1970s. Pablo concedes that he deals with similar social content in his work, but he's also careful to point out that his work goes beyond Puerto Rico, to Carnival in Trinidad, and he makes pictures in different ways, lately by using a panoramic camera.

And Pablo, who lives in West Hartford and who at 45 bears an uncanny resemblance to his father, didn't grow up watching the elder Delano take pictures. Jack Delano had put his camera down to work at an educational television station, and mostly what Pablo Delano remembers is his mother Irene salvaging the occasional photograph from the trash.

"They had tiny scratches on them. Now, they'd be considered vintage," he says, laughing.

But some of the very things that drove the elder Delano to document the Latino experience drive his only son. Jack Delano once sat with a group of students and tried to explain what it was about Puerto Rico that captured the heart of someone who wasn't even Puerto Rican -- who had emigrated from the Ukraine to the mainland United States when he was 7. It was the simple things, the elder Delano said: the warmth, the way people he photographed would rarely let him walk away without offering him "un poquito de café."

There is the same desire in Pablo's eyes as there was in his father's that day, a desire to find value where his parents found it when they adopted the island as their own in 1946, where he himself found it growing up there. His parents were, as he is, Puerto Rican in every sense of the word, but one - ethnicity. But for the Delano family, for the people of Puerto Rico who welcomed them, for those who welcome the younger Delano here in Hartford, that's a mere technicality.

Who else but a puertorriqueño could see through the screaming headlines about death and crime and poverty in the Latino neighborhoods to Sammy Tanco and Musicians at the Festival de Loisaida on New York City's Avenue C?

Click.

Who else but a puertorriqueño could see the value in documenting a bunch of compadres eating at El Mercado on Hartford's Park Street?

Click. Click.

Appreciation isn't about ethnicity. It's about heart, about a passion for people and their culture. Jack Delano had it until he died in 1997. Pablo Delano has it.

It's why he goes beyond creating pictures to creating an appreciation and an awareness by making pictures, by teaching future photographers at Trinity College and by supporting the work of other artists with the same desire, the same passion. It's why he stands so firmly behind fellow photographers like Juan Fuentes Vizcarrondo, another documentarian whose work he helped bring to Trinity College for an exhibition of photographs at Mather Art Space called "Puerto Ricans: Images of a Culture, Culture of a People," being shown through Friday, Feb. 18. Pablo has an affinity for Juan and others like him, artists who do their work out of love for the Puerto Rican cause, out of a sense of duty, almost, of recording every aspect of what makes up the Puerto Rican state of being, out of a realization that without these works - and artists - the value, the joy, the importance of the culture could be lost.

Whether Pablo Delano says it out loud or not, he's on a mission.

"Just the other day, I asked somebody, `Just when the hell did I become a facilitator?' "