Sophie Rivera a photographer who won acclaim making luminous portraits of Puerto Rican New Yorkers and other city dwellers before turning the camera on herself, died on May 22 in the Bronx. She was 82.
Her husband, Dr. Martin Hurwitz, a psychiatrist, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disease. She lived in Upper Manhattan and had been in a hospice facility in the Bronx.
Ms. Rivera, who was of Puerto Rican descent, began making portraits of her neighbors in the late 1970s, asking passers-by in front of her Morningside Heights apartment building if they were Puerto Rican. If they said yes, she invited them to be photographed.
The images she made were majestic four-by-four-foot prints of everyday New Yorkers of all ages. They were time-stamped by their hair styles and clothing as citizens of the 1970s and ’80s, but they were made eternal by their direct gazes, formal poses and the nimbus of light with which Ms. Rivera surrounded them.