Interview with Reynaldo Rivera

Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andrea Nieto.

“Mexicali is my Aztlán,” says the artist Reynaldo Rivera. He sits in the garden behind his house in Lincoln Heights, a few hours northwest of the northern Mexican city where he was born: capital not of the Aztecs’ legendary original kingdom, but of Baja California. His first exhibition in his hometown has just closed: Propiedad Privada, or Private Property, a retrospective at La Universidad Autónoma de Baja California organized through the Instituto de Investigaciones Culturales-Museo (IIC-Museo) in collaboration with Planta Libre, a local experimental space. In the exhibition, the photographer shared prints, but also VHS tapes, Polaroids, and even his Rolleiflex camera in a little shrine. “I wanted my folk, my Chicalicenses to experience all the best stuff.”

Rivera worked the fields in the San Joaquin Valley when he was very young: cherries, tomatoes, chabacano. When he was 14 or 15, he started working at a cannery and making “real money. The fields don’t bring any money to do anything.” He fell into photography when he spotted a 35mm Yashica in a box of stuff his father was selling. A woman running a Fotomat explained the camera’s mechanics, and the two daughters of the viejita who ran the Hotel St. Leo, where he lived, posed for him.

Over time, he began to photograph himself, his lovers, and the other “damp, slightly wilted glamsters” in East L.A.¹ What the Hungarian photographer Brassaï did for the Antillean dancehalls of 1930s Paris, Rivera does for the legacy of the Silverlake Lounge. Both men’s photographs remind their viewers that a kiss can melt a crowd away, in a bathroom or a booth. They show the streets around the bedrooms and bars they frequented: befriending the foggy glow of streetlights on cobblestone or concrete, and the euphoric claim that comes from running through them on late nights, young.

He entered the world of drag performers as if “going to a Diana Ross concert… They were the stars, and I gave them stardom.” In Las Reinas de la Noche, La Plaza, a picture from 1992 in the recent exhibition, a dancer’s body is the secure, illuminated, slippery center around which backstage dynamics swirl. Like Aztlán, the dressing room is a place in which myths are made —and not one easy to visit. The fact that the dancers allowed Rivera backstage at all reveals their trust in his perspective. “They’re long gone,” he told me, “but I’m like, I’m gonna leave you a star, bitch.”

Reynaldo Rivera, Las Reinas de la Noche, La Plaza (1992). Gelatin silver, 12 × 12 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

In Rivera’s pictures, nobody asks for permission to be themselves. In an untitled self-portrait from 1990, Rivera holds his penis and faces his camera, reaching for the shutter as his body lurches towards the lens. A book balanced on a trash can and a can of Barbasol shaving cream on the shower’s ledge render the scene real, but the artist’s tension renders his form legendary, like a Greek kouros, stepping forward with sexual purpose. Made in a time before text messaging, this picture still communicates desire for someone, to someone, of someone, but only after it had been taken, developed, selected, and printed. “This is a life lived,” Rivera explains. “The ups and the downs. And you can’t have a body of work or a life shown without the sex.”

Rivera speaks about his work in a way that locates it in photographic histories as well as social ones. Over coffee and pan dulce, he reveals his new monograph published by Semiotext(e), also titled Propiedad Privada. Taken in Echo Park or elsewhere, the photographs themselves are Aztlán: a place of self-determination that could be anywhere.

Farrah Karapetian: It feels like not only the content of the work is private property, but the material on display is sometimes private as well. Is that instinct unique to this show?

Reynaldo Rivera: The thing is it’s all been private property in theory… I didn’t do it for jobs. Most of the stuff isn’t for someone else. There are a few exceptions—like the stuff I did for the newspaper [The LA Weekly]. But even that was for me. I had a friend that worked there and I was like, “Can we make something out of this?” [S]he used to be the Fashion Editor for a bit…and so I made up these fake fashion trends. My sister would sew the clothes. I would photograph them, and boom out we go. Make some extra cash. I had a lot of fun.

Reynaldo Rivera, Propiedad Privada (installation view) (2025). © Hugo Ferme. Image courtesy of the artist and Planta Libre.

FK: Really, anyone—like Bill Cunningham, the photographer who shot The New York Times’ “On the Street” for 30 years—going out there and shooting trends, is just making it up too. I like the way we reference our predecessors in art, though, rather than the way fashion houses hire new designers to replace the brand’s namesake when they die.

RR: We all borrow. Anyone who says they’re original is insane.

FK: Sure, but you would still never say you are Brassaï.

RR: It’s funny you say Brassaï. My education was one used bookstore in Stockton, California. That’s where I learned everything, like Brassaï and Bresson and this lady called Lissette [Model]…

…I would devour this stuff…I had nothing else to do. The whole fucking day I would spend with my dad, either working or at the pool hall. [S]o when I discovered the printed page, oh my god… This granny that used to work the little bookstore, it was this old Filipina lady who, I guess liked me, because she would let me go into the side of the bookstore where the owner kept all of his shit, and fill up a box, and then she would charge me a dollar. Boom.

FK: Oh wow.

RR: [The owner of the bookstore] used to collect all this movie memorabilia… Tatler and Hush-Hush, all these magazines. I would read that stuff like the Koran, the Bible, the Torah—backwards and frontwards. I learned a lot about the old Hollywood.

FK: And about how people were pictured.

RR: One of the books was Félix Nadar, and he had done these photos of Sarah Bernhardt, where he took a fucking old curtain and wrapped it around her, so I did the same thing. …I’d go back to my St. Leo hotel. I was 16 or something. And I would ask these girls to pose for me… This was the late ’70s, so they were wearing halter tops. I had them put the sheets to here. [He gestures as if pulling the sheets up towards his pits.] Both of them were in the bed… I did photos of them and Minnie, the viejita who used to clean the place. And, they were so good.

FK: How did you image her? Was she working?

RR: No, no. There was the staircase, and [I photographed her] with the big glasses, the big hair. Those ginormous glasses.

FK: I noticed that male bodies are shown relaxing or in pleasure mode or just enjoying themselves in your work. I kept identifying joy and relaxation with the male body. In most pictures throughout representational history, you see women naked. You see women reclining. You see women having sex. You see men working.

RR: I wanted to create something that would be, how do we see pleasure? How do we see ourselves?

FK: And who’s “we,” to be clear?

RR: Ethnic folks, specifically. Ethnic queer, ethnic straight, ethnic folk, the secret life of ethnics. I feel that we have been portrayed by others most of our lives. Usually, most everything is being documented by someone else. Porn, you name it. It’s like someone feeding us us. What does sexy look like to us? What does that look like to me? What does that look like to you?

FK: Did you ever show your pictures to your friends, like Nan Goldin’s slideshows?

RR: No… Someone gave me her book The Other Side years ago in the ’90s, because, you know, if you took photos of a few drag queens, you’re always going to get pigeonholed. That’ll happen no matter what. Originally, I was always compared to Diane Arbus…

FK: What?

RR: …I think it was the subject matter. People are lazy. Diane Arbus, we might have taken photos of similar people but…

FK: …Totally different attitude.

RR: It’s like she made normal people look freaky; I made freaky people look normal.

FK: Exactly.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (1994). Gelatin silver, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

RR: There’s something to be said about documenting your own. It looks different. When you’re around someone like yourself, it’s easier for you to just be you. I was looking at these photos [by] Graciela Iturbide, who I was a huge fan of back in the day. I was looking at them with an older eye, and I was thinking, how funny, because she took photos of all these trans folk in Oaxaca… [T]hose photos are very famous, and I’m like I would never have taken their photo that way. I find it so kitschifying. [I]t’s funny that at one time I thought they were amazing. But they are, as photos. They’re beautiful… But they don’t show these people as they are, for sure.

FK: As people.

RR: This is how she saw them—or the airs they put on for her, because they probably thought this is how she wanted us to be. …[T]hese queens would have given me a very different persona, if I was the one taking the photo… [T]his is the reason my stuff looks different… [T]his is what I always tell my own young folk that are doing photography: There is a place for us, and the work you’re doing, as long as you’re being honest with it. Because you are going to see something that they won’t, when you document your own.

FK: I know that Mayté Miranda and Minoru Kiyota, from Planta Libre in Mexicali, were really proud to put this show together with you… What’s the difference between Propiedad Privada and other shows you’ve done?

RR: …I didn’t include everything, because I didn’t want it to be that diluted… So it really has all what I consider the best work, at least most of it, and then some of the new stuff. I think it really represents the work.

FK: How did Mayté and Minoru get in touch with you?

RR: …Minoru messaged me on Instagram and I immediately wrote him… I’m like, yes, I want to do a show. If that’s what you’re calling me for, then yes… I had been wanting to do a show in Mexicali forever. I mean, that’s my fucking hometown.

FK: You said on the phone, “that’s my Aztlán.”

RR: It is. It’s Mecca. Even though I didn’t really live there for very long periods of time, I was born there, and it’s so weird. It has this calling. It’s strange, like this place.

FK: Origin story. And you print your photographs downtown L.A.?

RR: [Printing is] half the work. …Every step has its reason and its impact on the final product… The developing, well, the shooting… Like, last night I did photos of this writer, and we shot this stuff…basically in the dark…so I knew, when I get home, I’m gonna develop this extra, even more than I usually do, because the fucking negs are gonna be really thin. Thank god I did. …You take this to the…enlarger, your darkroom, and then the rest of the magic happens. …I can make one image look so many different ways. You have to do it all to create your style, the final product. I tell you, I know this because I’ve tried to get other people to print my shit and it’s like…

FK: It’s a different voice.

RR: That’s the difference between each photographer, or each person, They will tell the same story a million different ways. That’s the importance of you doing it all. If you take your neg to someone else, they’re going to print it in a way: either… a machine just calculates the density… or they’re gonna put their own style. Some people print really dark; some people like really high contrast, and I’ve even gone back and forth myself. You can tell the stuff I printed in the ’90s, the late ’90s. It kind of goes towards the dark: very deep. I liked detail in the darkness. Not now. I guess I got to an age where I want it all. I want detail… all the darkness, but I want the light too…

Reynaldo Rivera, Propiedad Privada (installation view) (2025). © Hugo Ferme. Image courtesy of the artist and Planta Libre.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (2022). Gelatin silver, 11 × 14 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Farrah Karapetian, an LA native, makes artwork and writes about visual culture. Her artwork is collected at the J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA among other institutions. It has garnered support from the Pollock Krasner and Fulbright Foundations and been discussed in publications including Artforum and Art in America. Her writing earned her the Warhol Arts Writers Grant.

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