PROPIEDAD PRIVADA
Out this week, LA-based artist Reynaldo Rivera’s latest monograph, PROPIEDAD PRIVADA, is stacked full of rarely seen portraits of himself, his lovers, friends and their exes. According to Reynaldo, many of the images in this book were from two rolls of film he shot in the 80s that remained undeveloped for over a decade. He told us:
“This book is about love, but what does love mean, really? It has a different meaning to all of us. Each of us creates our own idea of what that word means through the things that happen to us in love. As we all know, love ends in tragedy more often than not.
You can’t talk about love in the 80s and 90s without discussing AIDS and how it went to bed with you and woke up with you. There’s a photo of my boyfriend sleeping. I remember when I took those photos. It was early in our relationship, I think within the first month, and I remember the anxiety of the “what if”. One of my lovers had just died of AIDS right before this photo – so condom or not, the anxiety of AIDS was always there and yet life went on.
But when in love, we can move mountains. There’s those moments when you’re in love that you feel so capable like you figured it out like nothing can go wrong. It’s like when you take a hit of acid and all of a sudden you know the mysteries of the cosmos and then you come back down to earth and you’re, like, ‘Oh shit I wanna get that high again,’ and that’s when hope begins and love ends.”