Boricua Lens: Sophie Rivera Portraits

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.

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.

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