Sophie Rivera

Renowned for her boldly intimate portraits of everyday Puerto Ricans in New York City, Sophie Rivera (1938–2021; born in New York) began her career in the 1970s, becoming part of a coalition of artists who sought to counter negative depictions of the Latine community in US popular culture. Her portraits, street photographs, cityscapes, graffiti-art photographs, and experimental self-portraits bolstered her as a trailblazing artist engaged with feminist and political consciousness. Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, published to coincide with a major exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York, features photographs, contact sheets, and artist statements alongside vivid new scholarship that places Rivera at the center of Latine and feminist art, as well as within the history of contemporary photography in the United States.