The Puerto Rican American photographer Sophie Rivera (1938-2021) is best-known for her 1978 Nuyorican Portraits. For the black-and-white series, she photographed Puerto Rican sitters in Manhattan\u2019s Morningside Heights neighbourhood to uplift the Latinx diaspora in New York City. <\/p>\n
Although she engaged with and celebrated Latinx communities, Rivera never wanted her work to be confined to identity politics. In fact, much of her output was highly experimental. Double Exposures, her first career survey, reassesses Rivera\u2019s practice, situating the artist within the broader discourse of post-war photography while foregrounding both her political activism and technical skill.<\/p>\n
While Rivera is under-recognised in the canon, Susanna V. Temkin, the show\u2019s curator, says that calling her \u201cunknown\u201d is inaccurate. The artist worked across portraiture, photojournalism and experimental image-making, and exhibited widely during her lifetime. She was actively involved in artist-led movements in New York, and she worked with networks of Latinx and feminist photographers and community organisers.<\/p>\n
Temkin attributes the genesis of the show to an enigmatic work Rivera donated to the museum in the late 1980s: the colour photograph Alternators (1975, printed 1986). Rivera captured the image from the inside of a subway car while looking out a window through graffiti. Alternators speaks to Rivera\u2019s \u201cexperience as a New Yorker, which she was through and through\u201d, Temkin says, as well as her long relationship with El Museo.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope this show becomes an opening for further studies of Rivera\u2019s work,\u201d Temkin says. \u201cThrough both the research process and the exhibition itself, there\u2019s so much more to uncover.\u201d She adds that Rivera\u2019s writing also merits greater attention, \u201cespecially the articles she published in the 1970s\u2014where she advocated for the freedom of women artists to exhibit nudes, for example, just as men were able to do.\u201d<\/p>\n