Humberto Rivas was a photographer, draftsman, filmmaker, and painter.
Background
Humberto Rivas was born on July 14, 1937, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He descended from Italian and Portuguese immigrants (his Portuguese grandmother, a washerwoman, taught him that language). His parents were textile workers, and at the age of thirteen, he himself began to work in the trade and would spend weekends training to be a professional cyclist with his father.
Education
When Humberto Rivas was seventeen he began a correspondence drawing course and sold his racing bicycle in order to buy a painter’s easel. The following year he started working as an apprentice at an advertising agency and was able to purchase his first camera, an Argus 35 mm with a fixed rangefinder. In 1959 Humberto Rivas would buy a Rolleiflex 6 x 6 that enabled him to take on greater challenges.
Career
In 1958 was the year the first public display of his drawings and paintings was made at Galería Lirolay and the following year the first exhibition of his photographs was held at Galería Galatea, both in Buenos Aires. In 1962 designer and sculptor Juan Carlos Distéfano, then director of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires invited him to run the department of photography of the legendary art center. Over the sixties and seventies, many Argentinean artists and creative personalities passed through the center and were captured by Rivas’s inexorable camera, influenced at the time by Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus.
Examples of works from this period include the portraits of Argentinean artist Roberto Aizenberg, taken in 1967 in a rubbish dump in Buenos Aires, and a portrait of Jorge Luis Borges taken in 1972. Juan Carlos Distéfano, Roberto Páez, Rubén Fontana, La Polaca, Grupo Lobo, and many other prominent figures from the cultural milieu of Buenos Aires of those years were also portrayed by Rivas.
This apprenticeship enabled Humberto Rivas to develop his own aesthetics, which strove to discover the other side of his sitters, which usually remained unseen. Later on, he began to introduce the mystery of identity and the poetics of silence and absence in his works. His close lifelong friendship with photographer Anatole Saderman, whom he regarded his master, would have a decisive impact on his career as a photographer.
As a film lover Humberto Rivas was particularly devoted to Ingmar Bergman, and greatly admired Sven Nykvist’s photographic lighting in the films by the Swedish director.
In 1974 he set out on his second journey across north Argentina, a trip that culminated in the portfolio entitled «Norte» (North) portraying the people and landscapes of Tucumán, Salta, and Jujuy. This work already points to some of the themes and procedures Humberto Rivas would develop later on in his career.
In 1976, after the military coup in Argentina and the imposition of state terrorism, Humberto Rivas, who found violence intolerable, moved to Barcelona in the company of his family and thanks to the support of América Sánchez who was already living in the Catalan capital. His arrival in February 1976 had an impact on the city’s art circles, bringing together all those who hoped to advance creative photography, which at the time was marginalized from other artistic disciplines. In 1982 Humberto Rivas took part in the first edition of Barcelona’s Photographic Spring festival, designed to draw attention to a medium that was not yet on an equal footing with other contemporary art disciplines.
His creative work ran parallel to the pedagogical commitments that brought him into contact with younger generations of photographers who were encouraged by his oeuvre and his experience, considering him a strict yet receptive spirit, a master of ‘pure’ photography, as a result of which a number of creative and dynamic groups would soon emerge.
Humberto Rivas continued his career as a portraitist in Barcelona and was commissioned to produce portraits of famous Catalan figures such as Joan Miró, Josep Tarradellas, Federica Montseny, Charlie Rivel, J. V. Foix, Salvador Espriu, Joan Brossa, and Antoni Tàpies.
In 1994 the Arles photography festival invited Humberto Rivas to make an audiovisual work on Jorge Luis Borges in which he interpreted the writer through one hundred slides, some of them taken at the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires.
In 2006 the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) in Barcelona organized a retrospective exhibition of his oeuvre. Rivas’s photographs of the years 2000 to 2005 are essential works that emphasize the nuances of black and reveal his mastery of chiaroscuro. Essence engages with subtlety in his last photographs, some of which are reproduced in the catalog of his last one-man show held in 2008, Iluminar.
Humberto Rivas’s photographs form a part of important art collections in Spain and abroad and a number of books have been published on his work.