Reynaldo Rivera’s Fistful of Love/También la belleza

Kari Rittenbach: How did you first begin to approach photography?

Reynaldo Rivera: Let’s start in the beginning. I got this camera, a Yashica, from my dad. We both worked picking stuff and also in the canneries. We were harvesting cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever was in season between July and September. We were migrant workers, which took us to Stockton, California.

Kodak invented the Instant camera to make photography accessible to the common man, apparently. But even that was expensive, and most people didn’t have the money to buy those cameras. A certain level of people could not afford those things. And that was my level.

I didn’t grow up with family photo albums—photography was not something that happened in our family from way back. As a child in Mexico, people would sit around in the kitchen during Christmas and birthdays and just talk about people in the family. We would remember. They would begin with the oldest, Bonefacia, my great-great-grandmother. And then my grandmother, and what happened on what date. By the end of the evening, I had a full story of the family—basically an oral history instead of a photo album.

Twenty years later, I bought my first camera from my dad. It happens to be in the very first photo of this exhibition. And in a way, I continued this tradition; preserving moments that I probably wouldn’t remember otherwise. My life was constant movement, and photography allowed me to freeze certain moments. This photograph is a reflection of me and my sister. How old was I?

Lauren Mackler: This is from 1981; you were 17.

Shit, I was young. At this time, I was still heterosexual in my mind. I was in the closet, just very deep in there. I was listening to punk rock and some music my sister introduced me to, which is really what caused the change. The music. I started dating a guy who worked as a music critic at the LA Weekly, Craig Lee. Because of this, I was able to photograph whoever I wanted. We also went to see Sonic Youth; their first tour.

KR: Aesthetically, film history has been an important reference for your work—especially silent movies and film noir. Where and how did you first encounter cinema?

I used to ditch school a lot and watch movies at 12 o’clock. There was a show called Hollywood Presents, with some old guy who talked about movies. The year I started watching, they were showing the filmography of all these different actors: Gene Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo. I became a fanatic, a true fan. This was before I bought the camera. I saw Blonde Venus (1932) and Shanghai Express (1932). Actually, my favorite silent movie is King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928). These movies really left an impact, as they have a very special lighting, which I believe cities also have. And then there’s Los Angeles—we’re the film noir capital of the world.

At one point I started going to Pasadena City College with my sister—I went along to her film class, because they would show movies for free. And we met all of these young people studying there at the time, who became friends. In the PCC class they screened silent movies like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)—a kind of documentary film telling the story of the city indirectly, through the people who lived there. I’ve always wanted to make a movie about LA in that way. A few years ago I found a place like this in the old Garment District in LA. I was doing photos for a gallery show, and I have to admit, I didn’t see it at first. When I developed and printed the work, I recognized the old LA: That alley in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Touch of Evil (1958), that alley of the long shadows which is gone because of a political need for safety. But you can’t have safety and liberty at the same time.

With photography, you’re showing the public the world through your eyes. If you really look closely at the image, if you pay attention to the little things, you can tell a lot about the person who took the photograph. I’m a homo who documented his own world. And my world’s already coded, especially the world in the mid-1980s. You could say I was decoding my environment for other people like myself, originally. My work was intended for me, my viewing pleasure, and my friends—the people in the photos. The exception was what I would do for the newspaper. But often, that was someone I liked or admired—one of us. And I don’t mean just queer. I mean people like us; we know who we are.

This is a pretty rare photograph. I had an issue with nudity—being a Mexican and a Catholic. I actually hated to see myself in the mirror. I still do. So, this was not a very common thing. When I was younger, we went to the beach with clothes on. It was a long time before I printed nudes of myself. I’m 18 here.

LM: This is a photograph from your “blue series” that was developed relatively early, while the others in the exhibition are images/negatives you only returned to last year.

That was another thing. These images were taken in the 1980s and never developed. The film stayed in a bag for years. Then one day, I think maybe in 1990, I found this bag with all these rolls and I developed it. This stuff was in it. I think I had issues with the subject matter. So yeah, I printed the image long after I took the photos.

KR: What was the art context in Los Angeles like when you first started showing in galleries?

I wasn’t really big on art for art’s sake. During my youth, it seemed that if something wasn’t created in a studio, it wasn’t art. And, mind you, I didn’t go to school for any of this, or any kind of school, really. For that reason, I also wasn’t considered for anything, because, in those days, if you didn’t come from those places, like institutions of education or art school, you weren’t that. So, I never viewed myself as an artist. I couldn’t even imagine it—but not because I didn’t want to be an artist.

I didn’t have the patience or the tools to deal with the art world then. And I was conscious of not having credentials.

LM: Tell us about the double title, Fistful of Love/También la belleza.

Love hurts. I was all about love since I was a child when I truly believed that love would save me. I mean, I grew up in misery, so I really thought 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, at 60, I can honestly say love isn’t the answer. It’s the question. It’s also like a vaccine: a little piece of the disease that you have to overcome. And so the reason I picked Fistful of Love is because love is a fucking fist. I am just saying.

The first half of the title comes from a song that I heard by Anthony and the Johnsons. And it begins, “We live together in a photograph of time.” And the other half of the title is a song called “También la belleza,” by Liliana Felipe. She’s one of my favorite composers, musicians, singers. I used to sing that song to my man because he was gorgeous, but she was dirty. She just left a mess everywhere. The song is about beauty and how beauty decays—even beautiful flowers fade and leave a stinking mess. And that’s like love. It decays, and then it leaves a stinking mess.

Almost everyone in the exhibition is young. I just thought of that. All the youth. And it goes by really fast. It’s like you’re young for such a short time and then you’re old for the rest of your life.

LM: One remarkable aspect of this exhibition is that while your work is deeply subjective (it’s your life, your people and places, your scene) it has tendrils into (and collides with) larger social histories and scenes (LA in the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic, music, fashion, queer clubs, literary and art worlds). You are capturing your life, but you end up capturing all these other things around you.

Well, you know, living is history. Every minute becomes history. I just happened to be in all these places when certain things happened. I was in Berlin when the wall came down, in Mexico City when the city fell in 1985, in September. And I was a queer child that unfortunately happened to come of age right at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, so I came of age during a time when sex was death, being gay was death.

Coming up gay, being Latino, poor, I feel that it put me in this trajectory. It wasn’t a common thing for kids from where I was coming from to be in these kinds of scenarios, to hang out with Annie Lennox or have dinner with Mark E. Smith from The Fall. I was a hustler on top of that. I had a good hustle.

You mentioned the backdrop of the Rodney King riots in one scene of my movie, the stores boarded up. It was just the way I was experiencing something happening to the city, to the neighborhood, to the places that I inhabited. And, yes, obviously that was the main storyline, but I was always paying attention to the other story, the story that didn’t matter at the time, or that doesn’t get recorded.