Elyse Regehr and Javier Orosco, Downtown LA, 1989

Rivera’s primary subject in the 1980s and 1990s was LA—East LA and Echo Park in particular—but, in contrast with the traditions of urban street photography, he was interested in intimate nighttime interiors where the normative constraints of the outside world give way. The subjects of his photographs are friends—artists, writers, and performers at house parties or drag queens and trans women at queer clubs. These photographs are testaments and archives of marginalized but fully embodied, vibrant individuals exuberantly staking claim to and performing their own queer and nonconformist identities. The photographs also elegize the social spaces that urban “redevelopment” has pushed further to the margins, like group houses in Echo Park and the Latinx gay and genderfluid bars often identified in Rivera’s titles such as Mugi’s and La Plaza.