Sophie Rivera's First Retrospective at El Museo del Barrio

Sophie Rivera, a New York photographer who died in 2021 at 82, is the subject of her first retrospective, 'Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures,' at El Museo del Barrio. From her Morningside Heights apartment with a view of the elevated subway, she captured graffiti-covered trains, transit workers, homeless individuals, and fellow commuters from the mid-1960s onward. Born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents, Rivera spent her high school years in a Staten Island orphanage after her parents' divorce. She later met her life partner, psychiatrist Martin Hurwitz (died 2023), and moved to the apartment where they lived for decades. In 1972, she bought her first camera and took a workshop at the New School for Social Research, studying under street photographer Lisette Model and Nuyorican documentarian Benedict J. Fernandez.