Boricua Lens: Sophie Rivera Portraits
by Valarie Irizarry 

Examining Sophie Rivera’s photos, both in En Foco’s permanent collection and the premier issue of Nueva Luz in 1985, one sees individuals looking directly at the camera. Their poses are simple and natural, but their eyes are deliberate in the intent to fully engage with the viewer. The clothing and hair hint at the person’s identity. From a mother and child seated on the subway to a young Puerto Rican man photographed with a dark background, each offers a bit of their story, devoid of the exaggerated stereotypes of the time. 

Rivera outlines her approach in her artist statement:
“As an artist, Latino, and feminist, I trace my photographic development from my earliest fascination with photographic images through various transformations to its culmination in a complex amalgam of vision and culture. Various aspects of photojournalism, portraiture, street photography, news, still lifes, and abstract urban studies have been central to my development as an artist. Individually, or in various complex combinations these modalities have been suffused with my creative energy. I have attempted to integrate my cultural heritage into an artistic continuum.”

Sources that help to decipher the what, where, and why of Rivera’s portrait journey include the Intercambio essay Sophie Rivera: Portraits by Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, in Nueva Luz Vol. 11:2 (2006), and references in En Foco’s Critical Mass newsletter. For Sophie Rivera, the camera was a way to document moments, concepts, and people that held significance to her. The way Sophie Rivera approaches her subject with directness and a sense of authenticity. Facing the photographer’s lens, each subject holds the viewer’s gaze directly, imparting a bit of themselves to their audience. There is a sense of individuality and representation that may have been missing in artistic portraiture of the time. Many of the photos on view are taken of strangers that she invites to take part in the creation of portraits. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sophie Rivera’s portraits highlight the under-represented communities of New York City. The same communities En Foco continues to serve.

The quest/search to learn more about Sophie Rivera’s photography began in January, with a visit to the space where Sophie’s full collection and archives are being kept/stored. After getting over the sheer volume of work, we concentrated on papers and ephemera. The things that paint a picture of an artist’s career outside of their body of work. With the recent launching of the Nueva Luz Study Center underway, access to Sophie Rivera’s archives inspired En Foco to expand current knowledge/information for the artist. Giving a fuller picture of Sophie’s professional and creative life.

Boricua Lens: Sophie Rivera Portraits – Press Release

En Foco, Pregones, and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater present Sophie Rivera: Beyond the Lens, a panel discussion highlighting the person, her life, and legacy of  Puerto Rican street photographer Sophie Rivera. The discussion is an initiative of the Nueva Luz Study Center (NLSC) and is part of En Foco’s efforts to preserve the culture and legacy of diasporic lens-based artists. 

The panel was organized by Bill Aguado, En Foco’s President, and featured panelists Marisol Díaz-Gordon, Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, and Nina Kuo. The discussion is attached to the exhibition, Boricua lens: Sophie Rivera Portraits on view at Pregones/PRTT until April 4, 2024, located at 575 Walton Ave, Bronx, NY 10451, and virtually at enfoco.org. 

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Rocio Aranda-Alvarado is part of the Creativity and Free Expression team at the Ford Foundation. She joined Ford in 2018 after serving as curator at El Museo del Barrio for nearly a decade. In that role, she presented visual arts and programming that reflected the history and culture of El Barrio as well as the greater Latinx and Latin American diaspora. Prior to that, from 2000 to 2009, she was the curator at the Jersey City Museum. Concurrent to her work in museums, Rocío taught as an adjunct professor; consulted and curated independently on Latinx and Latin American art and culture; and published and advised, in both a scholarly and curatorial capacity, at the Smithsonian Institution. She earned her PhD in art history from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

Marisol Díaz-Gordon was the former Program Director of En Foco from 1998 to 2011. She is currently working on her MFA in Digital Media at Lehman College, CUNY. She received a BA focusing on photography from City College, CUNY (2002), and an AAS in Advertising Arts/Computer Graphics from Bronx Community College, CUNY (1993). Her work has been exhibited in galleries and alternative spaces throughout New York, including by En Foco (2000 and 2011), George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York (2008), and Taller Boricua Gallery, New York, New York (2006). In 2008, she was nominated by En Foco for a commission with the George Eastman Museum to document landscapes in Puerto Rico. That work traveled to such venues as the Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2009), and is currently held in the permanent collection of the George Eastman Museum. From 2016 to 2018, ARTViews Gallery at Montefiore Medical Center collected, commissioned, and exhibited her work. She is also a participant in the Bronx Artist Documentary Project (2014). 

Nina Kuo photographs multi-global layered futuristic worlds that focus on multicultural issues that join in a larger community. After serving as a CETA photo artist, teacher, and public artist – she showed at En Foco, Bronx in 1990, finding new artistic outlets and exchanges. Early on she reviewed En Foco’s lecture series with Dawoud Bey and others sharing the challenges of POC groups with involvement in Basement Wksp., PESTS, and AAPI collectives. She has exhibited Art in collaboration with multi-media venues. Collections: MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Lib. of Congress, Biblioteque Nationale. Notably, Kuo has exhibited photos with curators: Sophie Rivera, Lucy Lippard, Lydia Yee, Thelma Golden, H. Pindell, Hatch- Billops Collection, etc.

Image Credit: Sophie Rivera, Self-Portrait.

Sophie Rivera (June 17, 1938 – May 22, 2021)  was a photographer of Puerto Rican descent, who was an activist and teacher. She is best known as a photographer whose work challenged stereotypical assumptions of Puerto Ricans in the United States. During her photographic career, Sophie Rivera’s neighborhood served as an inspiration for her body of work. From the maintenance and repainting of the IRT 125th Street subway to the people walking past her apartment building on Tiemann Place. Rivera was unique in her decision to represent and document her subjects through a combination of direct photography, neutral backgrounds, and double exposures that produce a strong and non-judgmental aesthetic to these portraits. 

In the 1980s Sophie turned the camera’s focus on herself and explored the world of self-portraiture. Rivera took photographs of her nude body from different angles by employing mirrors and captured human waste and other bodily materials as a tool for self-referentiality. In 1986 she photographed strangers during the Halloween Day Parade in Greenwich Village. In this series of photos, she wanted to explore, “the relationship between personal fantasy and personal reality.” She would later become a member of the En Foco Board of Advisors, and a curator while running her own photography gallery. Ms. Rivera’s photographs are featured in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo del Barrio, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among other institutions.

Sophie Rivera: Portraits
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

Originally published in Intercambio Nueva Luz Vol 11.2.

As a child, Sophie Rivera was always attracted to photographic imagery and to books. Eventually, through classes at the New School for Social Research, she began to work very seriously on several different bodies of photographic work. Ms. Rivera took classes with the American photographer Lisette Model (1901-1983), and her mentor’s influence is apparent in the way that Ms. Rivera approaches her subject. Inspired by the directness and the sense of authenticity of Lisette Model’s photographs, Ms. Rivera built a body of work that is part ethnographic research, part inspiration. Seated in similar positions and facing the photographer’s lens, each subject addresses the viewer’s gaze directly. Neither confrontational nor indifferent, each sitter seems to impart a segment of his or herself to the spectator.

In the early 1980s, Sophie Rivera decided to undertake an important task: the documentation of Puerto Ricans from her barrio. Having begun to work in photography several decades prior to this, the artist felt that recording the likeness of some of her people would be a fulfilling and significant effort. The artist chose eight of these majestic portraits to display at the Jersey City Museum. 

Large and soulful, these portraits present the sitters in a monumental way, underscoring their physical relevance for the artist. Once she had decided to take on this project, the artist approached her sitters in a very practical but unusual way. Standing on the street in her Harlem neighborhood, she asked some of those passing by if they were Puerto Rican. If they responded affirmatively, she invited them up to her home to sit for their portrait. This exchange of trust is one of the main underpinnings of this body of work, which relies on the mutual willingness of complete strangers to take part in the creation of a portrait. At one point, a group of young men—those we might now qualify as “at risk”—came to ask about the project and agreed to have their portraits taken also. The figure with his hood pulled up around his head is from this group, as is the young boy with the Afro wearing a military-style jacket.

Prior to studying photography, Sophie Rivera studied classical ballet but was always fascinated by photography. In addition to taking courses with Larry Fink, Ben Fernandez, and Lisette Model, the artist also did her own examination of the collection of photographs at the Donnell Public Library. Through her teachers and her own research, she began to develop her ideas about style and subject matter. Although she was born in Brooklyn, the artist lived most of her life in the Bronx, where her family frequently moved about. The Donnell Library became an important anchor for the artist and provided her with reading materials on photography that helped her to see the vast possibilities that this medium offers. For Sophie Rivera, the camera became a way to document moments, acts, concepts, and people of significance to her. She states:

“As an artist, Latino, and feminist, I trace my photographic development from my earliest fascination with photographic images through various transformations to its culmination in a complex amalgam of vision and culture. Various aspects of photojournalism, portraiture, street photography, news, still lifes, and abstract urban studies have been central to my development as an artist. Individually, or in various complex combinations these modalities have been suffused with my creative energy. I have attempted to integrate my cultural heritage into an artistic continuum.”

Like many artists of her generation, Sophie Rivera has occasionally felt the burden of representation. The consistent lack of imagery that features people of color in the art world, in museums and galleries, inspires artists like Sophie Rivera, and other artists of her generation like Juan Sánchez or Dawoud Bey, to bear this burden. Being attentive to her community, to her gender, to concepts of self and other, Sophie takes up the task of adding other faces to the world’s inventory of imagery. In a specifically non-documentary style, she places her subjects as purposeful sitters instead of incidental figures from a neighborhood street. 

Although the influence of street photography is clear, the artist is equally indebted to studio photographers from the 1920s, such as Morgan and Marvin Smith or James VanDerZee. Indeed, the quiet dignity displayed in the work of these historical photographers is equally apparent in Sophie Rivera’s work. There is reverence, acknowledgment, almost gratitude, on the part of the photographer for the grace and poise of the sitter. Known as the chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance, James VanDerZee’s images are instrumental to any history of the period. For their period, taken during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sophie Rivera’s portraits are similar points of illumination, highlighting the community of the west side of Harlem as New York City developed and the Puerto Rican community made its way from East Harlem into other neighborhoods. In addition to creating fine art portrait photography, Sophie Rivera’s work serves to document this history:

“The struggles and achievements of Puerto Ricans in the United States make up a still largely unknown history; what prevails is a distorted notion of the consequences of those experiences, shrouded in the language of pathology and the belief that those experiences have been overwhelmingly negative and, by implication, possibly anti-Puerto Rican.”

In the longer article from which this quote is drawn, Miriam Jiménez Román underscores the need for Puerto Ricans to accept racial difference as a significant part of self-knowledge and understanding. In order to begin to reconstruct this recent past, make history known, and catalyze the acceptance of such differences, projects like Sophie Rivera’s are critical. The subjects in Ms. Rivera’s images are visual testaments to racial difference as it has developed in the Puerto Rican community. Further, the need to represent Puerto Ricans in a positive light, as significant subjects belonging in the history of American portrait photography, was a guide for the artist. 

For much of her photographic career, Sophie Rivera’s own neighborhood has served as rich source material for her aesthetic production. Throughout the years, the artist has used the maintenance and re-painting of the IRT’s 125th Street subway station as her subject. This body of images is titled Men at Work and spans multiple paint jobs at this station. The station’s platform, visible from the artist’s home, has also served as a backdrop to her work on the changing of seasons in New York. Her love for the landscape of New York and her neighborhood is apparent in these images in which nature and the constructed environment are equally significant.  

With these images of Puerto Rican sitters from her neighborhood on the west end of Harlem, the artist recalls the early years of Multiculturalism and its effects on the art world. Her prominent figures, each presented with quiet dignity, have a tangible presence in the gallery. While her initial approach to this project had anthropological overtones, Ms. Rivera’s images reveal an artist’s personal vision of portraiture. Her decision to print large, square-format photographs recalls the style of Larry Fink, but her concentration on their figures is more directly focused into the sitter’s gaze and, only by subtle implication, their psychological state. Inviting her sitters into her home, the artist established a rapport that evokes a sense of serenity in each image. Portraiture, though it seems effortless with the aid of a camera lens, is never only about either the sitter or the photographer. Instead, a middle ground evolves, in which the sitter’s being and personality and the photographer’s eye and mind are all implicated in the creative process.

Valarie Irizarry (She/Her) is an artist, curator, and cultural worker of Afro-Caribbean descent born and raised in the Bronx. She earned a B.S. in Computer Graphics and Imaging from Lehman College CUNY, Bronx, New York, in 2007 and a certificate in art handling from the Bronx Council on the Arts in 2012. For over a decade, she has worked as a freelance art handler in the Bronx at such institutions as Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos, Derfner Judaica Museum at Hebrew Home at Riverdale, and Bronx River Art Center, among others. After completing a training program at the Joan Mitchell Foundation where she worked on the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) database project for older artists, she presently holds the role of Collections and Archives Manager at En Foco.

In 1974, En Foco was incorporated as an artist collective by three Puerto Rican photographers to provide exhibition opportunities and resources not available through mainstream arts resources. As we approach the 50th Anniversary in 2024, En Foco’s legacy of achievement and the spirit of the artist collective assures its sustained commitment to service as represented in its programming and archives.

The history of En Foco is preserved through its extant archival material — works of fine art, exhibition ephemera, including posters, catalogs, press and flyers, and complete sets of Nueva Luz, extending back to its first issue in 1985 to the present. The earliest exhibitions were thematic and mounted in bodegas, movie theaters, and similar community venues. These are the types of activities and projects that are documented in En Foco’s archives from the mid-1970s to the present.

Through the Nueva Luz Study Center, this living collection serves researchers, students, teachers, and artists in new and innovative ways.

• Nueva Luz: all 76 issues are digitized and available online for free, containing over 2,000 images and contributions from artists, essayists, art critics, curators, and scholars.
  
  
• Programming the living archive: exhibitions such as Boriqua Lens: Sophie Rivera Portraits, panel discussions, and a commissioning fund expand access to community cultural histories.
  
  
• Ongoing work: cataloging, digitizing, and adding to the Past Perfect database continues for exhibition history, Critical Mass Newsletter, and the permanent collection.

Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (aka Pregones/PRTT) is a multigenerational performing ensemble, multidisciplinary arts presenter, and owner/steward of bilingual arts facilities in The Bronx and Manhattan. Our mission is to champion a Puerto Rican/Latinx cultural legacy of universal value through the creation and performance of original plays and musicals, exchange and partnership with other artists of merit, and engagement of diverse audiences.

For more information about Pregones/PRTT, please visit pregonesprtt.org.