Ches Rivera: "States of America"
9/13/2025 - 11/06/2025

"My photography primarily involves roaming the streets, interacting and photographing everyday folks. I’ve always been restless for as long as I can remember. This relentless need to keep moving may have been the consequence of leaving home for America as a child. Photography has been a perfect way to remedy some of that. Over the years, I’ve used photography to explore the notion of home and belonging growing up as a first generation immigrant.

I photograph based on gut and feeling. I go out walking with an empty mind, open to whatever or whomever I come across. The photographs I make are based on my own subjective response to lived experience in the real world. The resulting images are in conversation with bodies of work by past photographers engaged in the longstanding tradition of depicting the American experience. "