A new exhibit at El Museo del Barrio in Spanish Harlem showcases the work of the late Puerto Rican photographer, Sophie Rivera.
The retrospective show “Double Exposures” features Rivera’s photos of Nuyoricans in baseball jerseys, at movie premieres, and wearing a pava — the straw hat associated with jíbaros, Puerto Rico’s farm workers.
The name has a double meaning, too. Rivera used the photo technique in some of her work, but even when she didn’t, her identities as both a New Yorker and a Puerto Rican are similarly layered on top of each other.
“For the Nuyorican and Puerto Rican community, there are certain anchors, certain clues, that she alludes to in certain images,” said curator Susanna Temkin, before sharing an example. “There's this lovely piece of a man against a wall where it says ‘Taíno’ behind him.”
Rivera became best known for her portraits “for a reason,” said Temkin.
“The people that she's portraying look so beautiful — the way she's using dodging and burning to create this halo, angelic, reverential effect,” Temkin said.
Curating a life
When Temkin first saw one of the few color photos that is now showcased in “Double Exposures,” it inspired her to look more into the practices of the photographer best known for black-and-white portraiture.
“I found ‘Alternators’ to be such an outlier,” Temkin said. “What I thought at first was a pure abstraction and then realiz[ed] that it's this fantastic image taken on the subway, looking through a graffiti-bombed window.”
She got connected to the artist through Rivera’s husband of 60 years, Martin Hurwitz, before Rivera passed in 2021. Temkin’s fear was that there wouldn’t be much to show of Rivera's storied career, as there was a fire that was rumored to have caused devastating damage to her archives.
“There's this mythology that I think has been created around Rivera's practice,” Temkin said. “One of which was that there had been a fire in her apartment and that she had lost a lot of work, and I think, for me as a curator, that had kind of stopped my inquiry, having heard that there wasn't much more to see.”
In reality, the fire was in her building, not her direct unit, and caused some water damage from the sprinklers. But, her work avoided any burns, smoke and ash.
Seeing what great quality Rivera’s work was actually in had stunned Temkin, as she continued working with Rivera’s widower, Hurwitz, on the eventual “Double Exposures” exhibition. He has since died, as well.
“Having the ability to go to the archive to see the estate and to really see just how many photographs, how many negatives, the contact sheets that existed, contrary to that kind of myth that we've all been circulating,” Temkin said. “Everything that you see in the exhibition, those are all lifetime prints. We didn't have to print a single thing, and there's so much more.”
One of the more unique elements of this posthumous collection is seeing the stages of Rivera’s work all in one place. In addition to her famous Latino Portrait series, the exhibit showcases her experimental work, ranging from gender role-bending self portraits and photographs of feminine hygiene products.
The retrospective is also a homecoming. Rivera first exhibited her work at El Museo del Barrio in the ‘80s, as one of the only women in Bronx-based photography collective En Foco, or “In Focus” in English.
Learn more
You can see Rivera’s well and lesser known works up close at El Museo del Barrio through Aug. 2.
You can also purchase copies of much of the work in the first comprehensive monograph on Rivera, co-published by El Museo del Barrio and Aperture. The museum said the book includes more than 125 images, selections from Rivera’s writings and newly commissioned essays.
