Welcome! This quick visual analysis is part of a larger reflection I’m working through where photography, memory, and visual storytelling can signal belonging and call us into action when it matters most.
As a creative director, I’m fascinated by the ways intent is communicated in the minutia that often goes unnoticed, but is undeniably felt. And as an Afrolatina photographer working in sustainability, I’m always considering how cultural preservation and representation is carried visually. I don’t take it lightly that each creative decision either affirms or diminishes value, especially for communities whose histories are often reduced to headlines, caricatures, or stripped of context once they enter the mainstream.
Every facet of the rollout of visuals for Bad Bunny’s DtMF album and performances has been grounded in one thing: belonging.
Each visual articulation of this album is an invitation to participate in it’s layered narrative. Whether via the text based visualizers to each track, the music videos for the top songs, the album art, the lighting design for his live performances on TV, the emblematic pink casita on his tour, or the iconic sugar cane fields on his Super Bowl halftime show, the visual identity of Bad Bunny’s album is consistently adding new layers to our experience of this historic record.
His team’s creative direction embodies specificity of experience; each adaptation is meticulously tailored to the context and intended audience.
We begin in the sugarcane fields, amidst the harvesters and laborers whose blood and sweat fueled the Puerto Rican economy after the U.S. manipulated the sugarcane industry on the island as a means of economic control. Starting here is a brilliant choice given the visual cues of a football field, which are centered around three main elements: grass, bright lights, and an arena of seats.
The opening shot of Bad Bunny in the sugarcane fields leans into the natural environment of grass already embedded in a football field and expands its meaning.
By introducing sugar cane, banana trees, and tall grass into the setting, the field is stripped of it’s glamor and reduced to what it is at it’s core: as a site of labor and spectacle. The performance reframes the field not just as a place of play, but as the highly capitalistic and complex site of labor and entertainment that it is - one shaped by extraction, control, and economic power.
This grounding in the land sets up the final visual move, which similarly relies on the natural conditions of the open-air stadium.
During the blackout scene showcasing dancers on defunct light poles, the camera drops low and forces us as viewers to look upward, mirroring the instinctive bodily response to a sudden loss of power.
By directing our gaze toward the open sky, the camera places us in the position of someone experiencing a blackout, a moment defined by uncertainty and vulnerability.
This positioning leans into the stadium’s openness to collapse distance - the San Fransisco sky becomes the Puerto Rican sky, transporting millions of viewers, if only briefly, into a shared experience.
These careful creative decisions transformed the Super Bowl’s natural environment of grass and open sky into symbols of meaning.
Rather than fighting the spectacle, Bad Bunny’s creative team repurposed what is already there, using the field and the stadium to reveal deeper histories of labor, power, and vulnerability.
Benitobowl resonating with so many shows the power of meticulous creative direction - where the message to your ideal audience is so specifically delivered, it becomes universal.
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💻 Paper Magazine with Creative Director of Bad Bunny’s halftime show - Harriet Cuddeford - talking show specifics and creative decisions.
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