Reynaldo Rivera

Fuck, photography was never something that someone like myself would’ve ever started or should have, considering how expensive this shit is. The film, I mean. Film, camera, paper. And so photography was not something that happened in our family from way back. I mean, as a child in Mexico, people would sit around in the kitchen during Christmas birthdays and just talk about people. They would begin my great-great-grandmother. And then my grandmother, this happened on that date. And by the end of the evening I had a full story of the family, which is basically the family photo album.

So now move forward 20 years later, I got a camera. And in a way I continued that. Preserving these moments that I probably wouldn’t remember. It allowed me to preserve these moments and to go back to them as many times as I needed because my memory is not that great. I moved around a lot with my dad. So my life was constant movement and photography allowed shit to freeze. I mean, how fucking amazing was that?

The fucking movies. Yes.

I used to ditch a lot and I used to watch movies at 12 o'clock. Well, it happened that one day I was there at 12 at this show called Hollywood Presents, I remember with some old fart that talked about movies. So I got to see all the greats, Gene Harlow, Dietrich, Garbo. I saw Blonde Venus. Shanghai Express. I was a fanatic, a fan, a true fan. And so from then on, so this would be like 1980. It was before I bought the camera. I think that’s what made me want to do photos because I wanted to make movies. I wanted to do that, whatever the fuck that was.

I saw these movies and it really left an impact that you can still see in my photos. If you walk around, if any of you know anything about silent movies, you see that they have a very special lighting, which is something that I believe also in cities have their special light. Every city has its light signature. It’s like one of those things where you have to stop and look, and pay attention, and you’ll see it. You’ll see the differences. Every city has its own thing. Sometimes it only reveals itself when you take photos, and then you get them back and you’re like, “Wow, it’s saying hello. It recognized me.”

Watching these old silent movies just changed my life. Well, my view of the world. Once you pick up a camera, it’s slowly in the beginning, but eventually if you do it enough, you start seeing things in the perspective of whatever format you take.

With photography, I really believe that what you’re selling to the public is that you’re showing them the world through your eyes. It is a signature of yourself. If you look, you can tell a lot about the person that took the photo, if you really look at the fucking image, if you pay attention to the little things. Like Ben Hur, these movies. Now you read about how the people that wrote the movie, the people that shot it, that all the shit that we believed was true about the characters. Because when we were kids, or young, we would watch this stuff and recognize ourselves in some of the characters. But nothing could be said. It was all subliminal. It was all this encryption shit that we grew up, in a way, learning by doing.

I’m a homo who documented his own world. And so my world’s already coded, that world of that time. And I was decoding my environment. Because, you know, this shit was really intended only to people like myself originally. Who else would’ve seen this stuff? Really? I mean, if not other like-minded people. And I never thought of this. It was really intended for me.

In the show, there’s a few, well, actually all the fucking photos were meant for me, but then there’s some that were really only meant for me, which hadn’t been shown for that reason. The ones with nudity of my man, men, plural, and women. I know there’s a photo of an older woman in ecstasy that was Monica, one of my exes. And I took it right at that moment.

(Laughing) I know. Hey, I’m a photographer. That’s what we do.

Being Mexican and Catholic and all that stuff, I thought about that, how long it took me to go to that place where I was okay with doing nudes of myself. So those photos that are in the show were actually, some of them had been taken years before I even developed the film.

I thought, you know what? Let’s show this. Because you know, I like the work.

If you look at the work, it’s not what I would consider explicit or even vulgar in the common sense. I was in sheer love when these were taken, and I think you could see that. I think you could see that in the photos. And so that’s one thing. And the other thing is also about the way that Latinos have been shown in imagery, especially sexual imagery, of this fetishizing of us, which I felt this work does not have anywhere. There’s no fetishism anywhere. Actually, you can’t see that anywhere, in any of my work. I’ve never been about showing what people don’t want to show. You know what I mean? I always wanted to show people at their best, not their wackiest. And even in sex or, yeah, in anything.

Honey, I was all about love since I was a child. And when I was a child, I truly believed that love was going to save me. I mean, I grew up in misery, and so I really saw that one day love would show up and it would be that one person, and we would ride into the sunset and la la la. But, fuck, it hasn’t happened. So I think at 60, I can honestly say love isn’t the answer. It’s the question. Well, it’s also, it’s not, what do you call it? Like the vaccine. It’s the disease that you have to, in a way, overcome.

And so the reason why I picked for this show, the Fistful of Love, because love is a fucking fist. The title comes from a song that I heard by Anthony and the Johnsons. And it begins with, “We live together in a photograph of time.” How fucking amazing is that? Just saying. And then the other half is a song called… También la belleza encochina la casa. She’s one of my favorite composers, musicians, everything. Liliana Felipe. And I used to sing that song to my man because he was gorgeous. The song is about beauty and how beauty decays flowers. And they mentioned in the song how even beautiful flowers decay and leave a stinky mess. And so that’s like love. It decays and then it leaves a fucking stinky mess.

A friend of mine from Mexico City was here visiting, Armando Cristeto, and I took him to see a show at the Silver Lake Lounge, which is a neighborhood bar in Echo Park. And that evening was this group of performers. One of them was Mrs. Alex and, anyway, so we’re watching the show and at some point my friend gets this look of excitement and he turns to me. He’s like, “Oh my God, do you know who this is? She’s like this huge famous person in Mexico City, like in Mexico.” She was like a mega star and very popular in the underworld.

So I introduced myself to her and we just hit it off. She came back to my place, I interviewed her that evening. She had left Mexico because she fell in love with this muscle guy, those muscle builder dudes. And so she followed him to California for love. For love. And of course he fucking dumped her in California. People cross borders for many reasons, not just to work in the fields. She crossed it for love and then, see, love did her wrong.

But, anyway, that was the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

So one day I was at La Plaza taking photos of Frau Alex, and she’s like, “I want you to take some photos of me in the dressing room getting dressed.” So I went in and I started taking photos when I came back and showed her the photos, then all the other girls were like, “Ooh, we want some photos too.” They allowed me into that world and I took photos of this for a couple of years.