A nightclub photograph can make a person famous for one night. Reynaldo Rivera’s pictures insist that the night also leaves a history. Friends, lovers, performers and rivals appear in the Los Angeles he documented from the early 1980s onward: backstage, at parties, under club lights and in rooms that conventional civic archives rarely preserve. His 2024 MoMA PS1 exhibition, Fistful of Love/También la belleza, treated those images as the record of a world people built together, not as colorful evidence of a lost scene.
The exhibition ran May 16 through September 9, 2024. MoMA PS1’s release identifies Rivera as born in Mexicali in 1964 and raised across places including Stockton, Pasadena and San Diego de la Unión before settling in Los Angeles. A self-taught photographer, he first photographed people close to him, including his sisters. His early darkroom was improvised; his bathtub doubled as a developing tray. These details matter because the archive did not begin with a museum commission. It began with a camera, access to a community and the will to keep looking.
Rivera used available light rather than imposing a neutral studio atmosphere. PS1 names spotlights at the Anti-Club, backstage vanity bulbs, birthday candles and streetlamps as sources in his photographs. Light here is not simply a visual style. It carries the places where people gathered, performed and made themselves visible to one another. A bright flash could flatten that world into spectacle; working with the light already there lets its conditions remain in the frame.
His subjects moved through queer clubs, music scenes and improvised fashion work. Some images appeared in LA Weekly, on posters or as headshots; others circulated among friends or lived on his walls. In conversation with MoMA PS1 curators, Rivera described photography as a way to hold moments amid constant movement. He also recalled growing up without family photo albums, while relatives kept people present by telling stories. The camera extended that practice into another medium.
An exhibition can make such work public, but publicity changes an intimate record. PS1 included pictures Rivera had not previously intended to show, including a personal “blue” series. Its release also acknowledges damaged negatives and subjects lost to AIDS, addiction and other hardships. Those facts make easy nostalgia untenable. The photographs preserve glamour, but they do not promise that beauty protected anyone from loss.
Rivera’s images challenge the idea that an archive must look official to carry authority. The people in them were not waiting for permission to become historically interesting. They were posing, working, dancing, making friends and making art while the city changed around them. Decades later, the museum can frame that record; it cannot claim to have created its importance. Rivera and the people who trusted his camera did that first.