Surface Acts: Photographic Opacity in Sophie Rivera’s Nuyorican Portraits

In 1979, photographer Sophie Rivera (1938-2021) began taking portraits of everyday Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans born or living in New York) in her neighborhood of West Harlem. While Rivera was not the first or only photographer to turn her lens on her community during the 1970s—a decade marked by Puerto Rican grassroots activism and cultural effervescence in New York—she was one of very few women working in a male-dominated field. Standing on a street corner, Rivera asked passersby she perceived as “archetypical Latinos” if they were Puerto Rican, inviting them to her studio to have their photograph taken. This series of unnamed, mid-perspective portraits set against a dark wood-paneled background was subsequently printed at a monumental scale. Rivera’s subjects are illuminated with high flash, which creates textured patches of bright light that draw attention to the surface and materiality of the photographs. This paper examines photographic surfacism as an aesthetic and political strategy of opacity in Rivera’s Nuyorican series and self-portraiture. It draws on the concept of opacity’s postcolonial Caribbean roots, which Martinican writer Édouard Glissant proposed as a right—an act of refusal that rejects transparency as a Western quest for positivist truth. I explore connections between the seriality of Rivera’s portraiture and its deployment in the regulatory visual rhetoric of ethnographic and identification photography. As sites of refusal that point to practices of visibility and the medium’s inability to index race, Rivera’s portraits contend with photography’s historical legacy as a technology wedded to racialized and gendered discourses of colonial Otherness.