Sophie Rivera, a New York-born photographer who passed away five years ago at the age of 82, is the subject of the first comprehensive museum survey of her work, currently on view at El Museo del Barrio. The exhibit explores the wide-ranging career of an artist deeply engaged with New York City’s urban landscape and its inhabitants, revealing much more than the portraits for which she is best known.

Born in Brooklyn in 1938 into a Puerto Rican family, Rivera experienced early hardship after her parents' separation in the 1940s, spending her youth in St Michael’s Home, an orphanage on Staten Island. She later moved to an apartment in Morningside Heights after marrying Martin Hurwitz, a psychiatrist, establishing a vantage point near the elevated subway tracks that frequently appear in her photography. Initially trained as a professional ballet dancer, Rivera transitioned to photography, studying under Lisette Model at The New School. Model’s influence is evident in Rivera’s unvarnished approach to portraiture, which avoids embellishment or idealization.

Rivera’s work often focuses on the overlooked or marginal elements of city life. From images of graffiti-covered elevated trains to candid subway passengers who confront her camera with defiant or guarded expressions, her photographs embody a complex dynamic of exposure and concealment. Rivera did not pose her subjects in a traditional sense but met them on equal ground, allowing their self-presentation to retain its integrity.

In the late 1970s, Rivera concentrated more deliberately on photographing Latino individuals, though accounts differ on her method of selection. While she once claimed to have asked people on the street about their Puerto Rican heritage before inviting them to a “studio” that was actually a restaurant, she later acknowledged that she did not inquire about their origins directly. Rivera sought images that captured brown skin against dark backgrounds, enhanced by careful use of flash and darkroom techniques to create glowing, almost spectral portraits. These works later gained a public presence as large-scale murals installed at the 161st St-Yankee Stadium subway station in the Bronx, a project sponsored by the photography collective En Foco and the Public Art Fund.

Beyond her portraiture, Rivera’s oeuvre includes more experimental and conceptual series. In the 1970s, she created “Rouge et Noir,” a collection featuring graphic, black-and-white images of bodily excretions and menstrual blood, aiming to document female physicality in an unfiltered manner. Some viewing these works have noted their stark, unsettling quality, which challenges traditional notions of beauty and artistic decorum.

Later, Rivera expanded her approach with “Two/Two” (1995), a series of large double-exposure photographs capturing children in playgrounds. Instead of frozen snapshots, these images convey motion and multiplicity of identity, with overlapping figures and doubled features that evoke a sense of instability and constant change in urban youth.

Throughout her career, Sophie Rivera shifted among documentary realism, portraiture, and conceptual experimentation, maintaining a persistent interest in the “infinite variations of urban chaos” and the complex humanity of New York City. This exhibition invites viewers to engage with her multifaceted legacy and the city she documented with relentless curiosity. The show runs through August 2 at elmuseo.org.