Reynaldo Rivera, MoMA PS1 review — sordid glamour from a 1980s LA photographer

Echo Park wasn’t always the preeningly hip, rapidly whitening Los Angeles enclave of vegan cafés and vinyl boutiques it is today. A few decades ago, when the photographer Reynaldo Rivera shared an apartment there with his sisters and a never-ending parade of passers-through, it was a predominantly Latino neighbourhood. It was also drug-soaked, dangerous, permissive and hugely fun. That, at any rate, is the vibe that comes through in a bracing, drama-filled retrospective at MoMA PS1 in New York. The photos invite us to join a large and extroverted cast crammed into small rooms, dark clubs and dingy bathrooms. You may be uncomfortable, but you will not be bored.

“It wasn’t that long ago but it might as well be,” Rivera wrote. “In a city that reinvents itself with every new generation, one has to leave breadcrumbs to be able to find the way back.” His pictures from the 1980s and 1990s are those trail-markers, leading to a fleeting moment when living was cheap, jewellery big and clothing optional. Rivera wants to make it clear that “we were here”, and his “we” embraces immigrants, Spanish-speakers, artists, clubbers, performers of all stripes (mostly unaffiliated with the movie industry) and pioneers of various sexual identities. “We tend to get erased and leave our neighborhoods without any traces . . . We leave very little written material behind. We’re always found in the footnotes of others.”

The MoMA PS1 show bubbles with hard-won nostalgia for a world in which drunken joy had plenty of work to do fending off the spectre of Aids, the shadow of Echo Park’s gangs, the miseries of ostracism and, eventually, the pressures of gentrification. You can practically hear the bellowing laughs and crude humour in the black-and-white images of friends swaying to a raucous soundtrack, drinking, dressing up, posing and having sex — all under the eye of the young man with the camera. Few of them had easy lives; Rivera certainly didn’t.

Born in Mexicali, Mexico, in 1964, he endured a punishing and nomadic youth on both sides of the US border. His parents moved to California when his teenaged mother was pregnant with him; five years later, his father kidnapped Reynaldo and his sister and dropped them off with an abusive grandmother they didn’t know in a Mexican town they had never seen. He eventually wound up back in California, bouncing among neighbourhoods and part-time jobs (picking cherries, canning Campbell’s soup). He took drugs, joined — then extricated himself from — a gang and listened to his mother obsessively planning his father’s murder.

“She went over every detail: how she would dismember his body in the tub, and put it in plastic bags and throw it away in different trash cans,” he reminisced. (Fortunately, she left that fantasy unrealised.)

In the middle of this catastrophic adolescence, Rivera acquired a camera and discovered what an artist could do with it. He ferreted out 50-year-old film magazines in second-hand bookstores, and they became his bible. He read obsessively, transporting himself out of dismal reality by devouring everything he could find about film and photography. The past hooked him young: his library eventually included books about Lisette Model, Brassaï, André Kertesz and EJ Bellocq, and he became addicted to the films of Garbo, Harlow and Dietrich that showed daily on TV.

In the less luminous present, the camera gave him a measure of control over an otherwise chaotic life. “I thought if I could capture these moments, keep them on file, I could find some kind of order,” he said. “I was constantly creating the movie I wanted to be in as opposed to the one I was born into.”

Among the characters in that movie is Cindy Gomez, whom we see taking command of the Echo Park flat as if it were an arena stage. She grips a microphone in one fist and leans into it, her mouth wide to release a presumably powerful note. In an earlier part of the 20th century, she might have been one of the cabaret singers that Model photographed in Sammy’s Bowery Follies in Manhattan in the 1940s. The spaghetti strap falling off one shoulder and on to a furred arm is the detail that nails the shot.

But, of course, Rivera is the real star of Rivera’s narrative. He’s a lithe and nude Narcissus of the 1980s, gazing into the mirror to admire his sinuous slouch. There he is again, a marvel of cinematic grooming with brilliantined hair, pencil moustache and soul patch, peeking over the shoulder of a woman who stands in the foreground but out of focus. By the 1990s he’s grown bulkier, with a thicker forelock and more robust facial hair as he shoots from his spot between two provocatively dressed companions of indeterminate gender.

Even when the photographer is not in view, he is ever-present, often with an assist from the mirror, which reveals the camera lens poking into a crowded scene from the corner of the frame. Hanging out with Rivera meant letting him enfold you in his round-the-clock, fully immersive theatre. That’s also the limitation of his work. He documents a lifestyle of poses, performances and altered states, steering clear of his friends’ inner lives. He does not bring a portraitist’s insight, an anthropologist’s detachment or a stalker’s patience, only a scene-setter’s atmosphere.

Rivera cites the influence of his metier’s greats, but the connection is usually formal rather than spiritual. His nocturnal shots of LA’s clubland evoke Brassaï’s Paris by Night, the definitive dissection of 1930s decadence. But Brassaï pursued and observed off-duty entertainers, audiences and lurkers from a professional distance, clicking the shutter only when they fleetingly earned their place in his spotlight. Model had an even more analytic eye. And Diane Arbus, one of the unacknowledged members of Rivera’s pantheon, was constantly trying to pry off her subjects’ masks, while Rivera had more affection for surface.

Once you notice the Arbus connection, you see it everywhere, especially in the affection for goofy, not quite convincing make-believe. Rivera’s sister gives the camera a dead-eyed stare with a tough-girl cigarette hanging from her lips, but she might just be about to giggle. A shirtless man with his belt unbuckled rests one shiny boot on the toilet, but his stare is less come-hither than get outta here, and a pucker of flab around the pecs undercuts the seductive pose.

Arbus would have emphasised the sordidness of the scene and bared the sadness of artifice by using a pitiless flash. Rivera uses available light, however scant, which hazes detail and amps up the romance. That’s because he is not in the business of ripping veils or telling unwanted truths. He is content to party along with the partiers, celebrate their deliberate insouciance and show them precisely the way they want to be seen.

To September 9, momaps1.org

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