Lissa Rivera: Beautiful Boy

I first saw Lissa Rivera's Beautiful Boy series at Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. There was a buzz about her work amongst the reviewers. I hadn't had a formal portfolio review with her, so I was curious. I glimpsed the images (she was surrounded by onlookers) at the Festival's Portfolio Walk where it ended up she was the winner of that year's People's Choice Award. Not a surprise.

I was delighted to rediscover this series while jurying Photolucida's Critical Mass competition earlier this month. I had forgotten not just the strength of Rivera's picture making, but the bravery of her subject. This beautiful boy is revealing his secrets, not just to the photographer, but to us, the audience, the public. Having exhibited projects about gender identity in the past, such as Lindsay Morris' You Are You and Mariette Pathy Allen's TransCuba, I'm a strong supporter of Rivera's poignant and important photo essay. Here is what the photographer has to say about the work:

Beautiful Boy is an ongoing project that began as a confession between two friends. On the subway one evening, my friend shared that he had worn women's clothing almost exclusively in college, but after graduation struggled to navigate a world that seemed both newly accepting and yet inherently reviling of male displays of femininity. I thought that photography could provide a space for him to experiment with his identity outside of isolation.

Taking the first pictures was an emotional experience. I connected with my friend's vulnerability. I wanted to make sure that the images were not a compromise for either of us, and we engaged in many discussions. Both of us have long, fraught relationships with femininity that have fundamentally shaped who we are. Our desires were matched. They had the desire to see themselves and I felt driven to capture their exploration. A part of my own identity that had defied expression also began to emerge. As time went on, we realized that we had unexpectedly fallen in love. He became my romantic partner and collaborator.

I wanted to make images without shame, to show his femininity as strength. I wanted to feel empowered as well, to have an intimate muse. When taking the photos I felt the same as when viewing a film where a director and actress share a deep connection to the fantasy captured. Although our emotional relationship is private and real, we perform a romanticism that is obsessive and decadent. We connect to images, films and records of women that we idolize and consume together.

Collaging the visual language of the past, I tap into deep-seated narratives about gender, desire, freedom, and cultural taboo. The fantasy of dressing up transforms the act of being photographed into one that fuses identity creation with image creation. The camera transposes our private experiences into public expression.

Luckily for us, Beautiful Boy is being exhibited in a number of venues nationally and internationally in the coming months. Most recently, the series was exhibited in conjunction with Atlanta Celebrates Photography. The show just closed on October 18th, but if you are in Montreal, Canada, the Centre Never Apart has the work on view as part of the exhibition, Non-Binary through January 15, 2017. The Photo Review 2016 will be featuring selections from Rivera's project at Gallery 1401, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, from November 4th – December 7, 2016. If you're on the east coast, don't miss this great show juried by Malcolm Daniel of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In Fort Collins, Colorado, The Center for Fine Art Photography will be showing Beautiful Boy as part of their Portraits 2017 exhibition juried by Karen Marks. Rivera has already received an Honorable Mention for this competition; the exhibition will be on view January 14, 2017 – February 25, 2017. And lastly, Clamp Art in New York City will be exhibiting Beautiful Boy in June 2017. Clamp Art is also now representing Rivera, so you can stop by the gallery anytime to see original photographs by the artist.

Brava, Lissa Rivera!

Biography

Lissa Rivera is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY whose work has been exhibited internationally. She grew up near Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak, where as a child she was exposed to the treasures at the Eastman Museum. After receiving her MFA from The School of Visual Arts, Rivera worked professionally in collections, including the Museum of the City of New York, where she became fascinated with the social history of photography and the evolution of identity in relationship to photographic technologies. Beautiful Boy, Rivera's latest project, takes her interest in photography's connection with identity to a personal level, focusing on her domestic partner as muse.

Selected press for Beautiful Boy includes The Guardian (Observer), Slate, The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Feature Shoot, Advocate, L'oeil de la Photographie, Flavorwire, GUP Magazine, A-Curator, Creative Boom, Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography and Humble Arts Foundation. Rivera has been featured in several publications, including 25 Under 25 Up-and-Coming American Photographers (PowerHouse Books), curated by Silvia Plachy. She was chosen as a Woman to Watch for the biennial exhibition at the National Museum of Woman in Arts. In 2016 Rivera received the The Peter Urban Legacy Award in the Griffin Museum Juried Show and was also a recipient of Feature Shoot's Emerging Photography Award. Rivera is represented by ClampArt, New York.

Cedric Roux: Before Rebirth

By Cedric Roux

Publisher : ODYSSEE

2024 | 96 pages

Empty storefronts dot the downtown, while massive brick tobacco warehouses stretch the length of city blocks—abandoned and awaiting creative reuse. Wilson, North Carolina, feels frozen in the 1970s. Invited by the Eye on Main Street festival, photographer Cedric Roux made several trips to this enigmatic town. For a photographer used to capturing the vibrant energy of New York City streets—his first book, My Wonderland (now sold out), vividly chronicled the bustling metropolis—his initial encounter with Wilson was a profound shock.

Expecting a town in the midst of a vibrant renaissance, Roux wandered Wilson daily, exploring its diverse areas: downtown, affluent suburbs, and struggling neighborhoods. On either side of the railroad tracks that symbolically and socially divide the city, he sought a light that might suggest an emerging revival..

In his latest book, Before Rebirth, Roux captures this sense of disconnection, using his lens to explore a promise not yet realized. With a population of just 47,000, Wilson is a far cry from Manhattan’s 1.5 million. Used to the dense human energy that fuels his photographic style, Roux found himself reimagining his approach. His work took on a more stripped-down, documentary aesthetic, yet it remains deeply rooted in place and retains the distinctive palette and framing that define his vision..

In collaboration with artistic director Jean-Matthieu Gautier, Roux drew from his imagination and visual archives to craft a narrative that stays true to his photographic roots while stepping far beyond his usual realm.

All About Cedric Roux

John Divola: San Fernando Valley

By John Divola

Publisher : Nazraeli Press

2024 | 60 pages

From the publisher: San Fernando Valley is where John Divola was born and raised, and it served as both backdrop and subject for his earliest, serious photographic explorations, made during the early 1970s. This previously unpublished body of work shows “the Valley” through the eyes of a young photographer who would soon become an internationally-recognized artist with the exhibition and publication of his much more conceptual “Zuma” series. The black and white photographs in “San Fernando Valley” comprise a series of subject groupings which, pulled together, show early manifestations of the deadpan humor and the ability to capture everyday scenes wrapped in loneliness, for which Divola is now well-known. The book is also, and not incidentally, a fascinating record of a quintessentially 1970s Los Angeles culture. John Divola’s work is the subject of numerous books and catalogues. Widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, Divola’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of many public and private institutions, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

All About John Divola

Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters

By Cig Harvey

Publisher : The Monacelli Press

2025 | 224 pages

Following her celebrated monograph Blue Violet (Monacelli, 2021), photographer Cig Harvey continues her personal study of sensory experience, focusing on the ephemeral nature of light, pigment, and vision. Her latest photographs are lush tableaux of her signature subjects – flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in landscape – accompanied by prose vignettes on the science and art of color, written in her vibrant, intimate style. Featuring an afterword by award-winning novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, Emerald Drifters is a catalogue of pleasures and heartbreaks, and ‘an urgent call to live.’

All About Cig Harvey

Helmut Newton. Berlin, Berlin

By Helmut Newton

Publisher : Taschen

2025 | 244 pages

Born in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Newton trained as a teenager with legendary photographer Yva, following her lead into the enticing pastures of fashion, portraiture and nudes. Forced to flee the Nazis aged only 18, Newton never left Berlin behind. After his career exploded in Paris in the 1960s, he returned regularly to shoot for magazines like Constanze, Adam, Vogue, Condé Nast's Traveler, ZEITmagazin, Männer Vogue, Max and the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin as well as his own magazine Helmut Newton’s Illustrated. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned him to retrace the footsteps of his youth to capture the fashion moment. The resulting portfolio, Berlin, Berlin!, inspired the title of the exhibition which celebrates 20 years of the Helmut Newton Foundation. This collection includes Newton’s most iconic Berlin images, as well as many unknown shots from the 1930s to the 2000s: nightcrawlers in uber-cool clubs and restaurants, nude portraits in the boarding houses he knew from his youth, and the Berlin film scene, featuring Hanna Schygulla and Wim Wenders at the Berlin Wall, John Malkovich and David Bowie. In October 2003, only months before his death, Newton moved large parts of his archive to his new foundation, housed in the Museum of Photography beside the Zoologischer Garten station―the very station from which he fled Berlin in the winter of 1938. This publication thus closes a circle in the story of his extraordinary life and work.

Lissa Rivera: Beautiful Boy

Lissa Rivera

Selected Books