‘We are not the footnote’: In photos, Reynaldo Rivera evokes L.A.’s queer Latino bohemia
In Reynaldo Riviera's new photographic monograph, lost moments of Los Angeles in the 80's and 90's seem almost frozen in time. The monograph is titled "Reynaldo Riviera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City" and features snippets of the underground queer Latino scene, chronicling early moments in the careers of now well-known L.A. art personas. Riviera's work will be featured at the Hammer Museum's biennial, "Made in L.A. 2020."
"Reynaldo Rivera didn’t pick up a camera with the intention of making art. The Yashica he retrieved from a pile of his father’s things was a way of bringing order to a peripatetic life that had him bouncing between the care of his mother, his grandmother and his father, between Mexicali and Los Angeles, between Stockton and San Diego de la Unión, a small, agricultural outpost in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato.
Reynaldo Rivera, in 1981, photographs himself in a mirror over his sister Herminia Rivera’s shoulder. (Reynaldo Rivera) “I did it out of this need to have something stable in my life,” he says. “Photography makes time stand still. And for someone who has had a crazy life, hectic and moving (I left home when I was very young), it gave me some kind of normalcy. ... It allowed me to freeze time in moments that were special to me, and I was able to relive them over and over.”
Those frozen moments are the slivers of Los Angeles of the 1980s and ‘90s, pieces of city that no longer exist or have been rendered unrecognizable."— Carolina A. Miranda, Feb. 4 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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