Eduardo L Rivera

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first photographs that struck me were snapshots of my mother during the late 1960s after she and her family emigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico to Phoenix, Arizona. My mother sat me at the kitchen table and pulled out a shoebox containing stained Kodak prints. As I looked at places that I had never seen before, and relatives whose faces were unknown to me, she spoke of her childhood and the wondrous memories that were translated into the pictures. While gazing at a portrait of herself at ten years old, her voice tightened as she recalled the pain of being separated from her homeland of Mexico for a more prosperous America. As my mother ages, the details of these family stories shift but the pictures stay the same.

Influenced by the pleasures and terrors of home life in the American Southwest and the current political discourse concerning Mexican immigrants, I make collaborative photographs with my mother that depict fragments of the quotidian to suggest a very personal relationship to the borderlands—the margins where people make their lives.

 

Eduardo L Rivera is an artist whose work functions at the intersection of photography and personal narratives. He has exhibited throughout the United States including the Tucson Museum of Art; Houston Center for Photography; the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University; and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Additionally, his work has been featured in various web and print publications, such as GOOD magazine, Aint–Bad magazine, Hyperallergic and has been commissioned by The Financial Times weekend magazine and The New York Times magazine. He has held artist-in-residence positions in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India; and will attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture during the summer of 2019.

Most recently, Eduardo was named a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in photography, a winner of the Magenta Flash Forward Emerging Photographer Award, and a runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Rivera received a B.F.A in photography from Arizona State University and an M.F.A in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art. He currently lives in Boston and works in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.