Bronx-born scholar Sebastián Pérez recently chatted with me about photographer Sophie Rivera, whose work was most recently exhibited as part of the wide-ranging traveling exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Rivera’s photographs have been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of New York, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Center of Photography, and elsewhere. In this interview, Pérez and I discuss Rivera’s series of Nuyorican portraits and the various revelations we experienced while revisiting her work.
LMM: At present, there are very few opportunities to look at, study, and engage the work of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican women photographers from the 1970s and ’80s like Sophie Rivera.
SP: It’s ridiculous actually because the work is there. We both know that the archive exists, the images exist, but we don’t have access to them because historically no one has paid attention to it in any real specific way or bothered to collect this stuff. Even just trying to find materials from the shows that went up is a challenge; there was never an active archival process, right? It’s like, if you’re lucky, you can get a list, but where are the materials? Did these artists get paid? It’s even impossible sometimes to find exhibition catalogs.
LMM: Yeah, you have to look on eBay [laughs].
SP: Or used on Amazon!
LMM: Right. We know the materials existed at one point, but if they’re not kept, then they’re not findable, and if they’re not findable, then they’re not referenceable. I visited The Schomburg recently to look at some of Sophie Rivera’s earlier photographs because they’re one of only a handful of libraries in New York that has those early issues of Nueva Luz. I also saw that she had guest-edited one of their early issues . . .
SP: Yeah, volume 3, number 1, 1989.
LMM: It’s also wild to think about her work appearing alongside those of photographers like Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems—their work was also featured in those early issues of Nueva Luz. How did you come to learn about Sophie Rivera’s work?
SP: I started looking at images from the South Bronx during the 1970s and ’80s and I was trying to find out who the female photographers during that time period were; the two most prominent Puerto Rican ones I had come across were Perla de Leon and Sophie Rivera, but trying to track down their work is almost impossible because it’s not widely curated. In Rivera’s artist bio from the premier issue of Nueva Luz, we know that by 1985, she had already shown work at PS1, The New Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and many other art institutions in New York and beyond. I also know that the Smithsonian has two of Rivera’s photographs from the Puerto Rican portraits series in their collection…
LMM: Yeah, I had seen a few from that series at the Brooklyn Museum last summer as part of the Radical Women: Latin America exhibition. When they were shown at the Bronx Museum in 1999—twenty years ago now, if you can believe it—Holland Cotter, in his review for the New York Times, said that her portraits were “incandescent.”
Sophie Rivera, Untitled, 1978, printed 2006, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, © 1978, Sophie Rivera, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2011.24.2.
SP: Yeah, I love these, they’re so beautiful. I mean, they’re huge. That’s what I love about them. I’ve also always liked the conceit, a pretty simple idea—Rivera would stop people out on the street outside her apartment in the Bronx and and ask, “Yeah, are you Puerto Rican? Alright, cool, then let’s go to my studio.” I like the way that she photographs her subjects with the light coming from behind them, or at least, so it seems. I mean, these are portraits, yes, but the kind of background against which they’re being photographed is something you rarely see. You just never see studio portraits like this with such dark backgrounds, darker than the subject. Most people do not photograph portraits on dark backgrounds because that would lead to some kind of obscuring of the person or subject being photographed, right? But Rivera took these portraits the way she wanted to, defying conventions of portrait photography. I think the dark background combined with her particular lighting choices allows the subjects to appear in a way that is interesting, like as the photographer, she’s not afraid of the negative space of blackness. Those choices definitely say something to me about the artist’s personality, her style.
LMM: I also wonder what it means for these portraits, like the one dated from 1978, to have been exhibited again in 1989, the same year she received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Photography. When these works were shown at Yankee Stadium and 161st Street, the series was exhibited under the title Revelations: A Latino Portfolio, whereas when they were shown again in 2018 at the Brooklyn Museum’s Radical Women: Latin American Art exhibition, they are grouped under the title, Nuyorican Portraits. I can imagine that the former title, in the context of a group exhibition devoted to Latin American art, would have felt redundant.
Sophie Rivera, Untitled from “Nuyorican Portraits,” (1978). Courtesy of the artist, collection of Martin Hurwitz.
SP: While all of Rivera’s subjects from this series identified as Puerto Rican, maybe by using the word Latino, she is gesturing towards a more expansive definition of community in 1989, but she’s also playing with the idea of what a photograph does, right? That’s why it’s called Revelations. What is the light doing in this work? If you’re revealing something, then you’re bringing a certain degree of light to that something, but in these portraits, it’s the opposite. It makes you kind of wonder, well then what is the work of revelation? How does her ability in balancing the contrast upend that notion of revelation as a shedding light?
LMM: I never thought of that. Did you know that she produced at least fifty of these, but only fourteen survived a fire in her studio?
SP: Damn . . .
LMM: It’s so dark, so Bronx.
SP: Rivera chose subjects that kick those taken-for-granted identity categories, like Latino or Puerto Rican, into flux by presenting through this series a bunch of differently raced and differently classed bodies together. When grouped together, these portraits suggest the Puerto Rican who is a Latino is a black person, a white person, is well-dressed, is Urban and . . .
LMM: Maybe also being Latino while seeing Latinidad in all its incarnations is itself a revelation.
SP: There are so many questions I would like to ask Sophie.
LMM: I know! Since I am often interested in an artist’s process, because that is not necessarily something you can discern in a final work, when revisiting this series, I wonder: How long did these sessions last? Did they take an hour? More? Less? Around how many shots did it take to get “the one,” or did it depend on the person? What kind of rapport did she have with these people? I am interested in the interactions between Rivera and her subjects because the subjects seem so present, and, at times, open. How did she draw that out in them? She was not an amateur in the least, and unlike many of the other photographers who featured Puerto Ricans in the Bronx during this time period, like photojournalist Mel Rosenthal or the members of Los Seis del Sur, Rivera did not photograph her subjects in their apartments, or on the street, or at work—she situated them within her studio as photographic subjects, and the only reason she wanted to photograph them was because they identified as Puerto Rican. So what we have on record here when studying her works is not just a record of Puerto Ricans in the 1970s and ’80s, but a record of one Puerto Rican looking at another. It’s quite powerful, to see and be seen. The gaze isn’t casual, or candid: it’s willful, and, as you’ve suggested, subversive.
Sophie Rivera, Untitled, 1978, printed 2006, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, © 1978, Sophie Rivera, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2011.24.1.
SP: There are also religious undertones as well. I’m thinking of photos of Christ, like the kind where he has a halo of some kind, where this divine light emanates from within, but also behind. Rivera positions her subjects in relation to the light in a way that suggests everyday people possess that same light. I mean Revelations—that’s the last book of the Bible, right? That book is about the end of the world to a certain degree, so like maybe in these images, we see the end of a certain world, a world in which these people are obscured.
LMM: Yes, and that’s what interests me about Sophie Rivera’s work: her style of looking, her way of capturing her subject’s essence; the way she returns the gaze. The kind of rogue, bold decision making that prompts her to approach a stranger off the street in the first place and ask “Are you Puerto Rican?” Imagine saying, unequivocally: Yes, and that being the starting point . . .