At 34, after a career as a classical ballet dancer, Sophie Rivera (1938–2021) turned to photography and spent the next five decades making charged images of life in New York City. Working from her apartment in Morningside Heights, its windows overlooking the elevated subway around 125th Street, she photographed Puerto Rican neighbors, public school classrooms, protests for affordable childcare, and the subway from many perspectives—its passengers, its graffiti, its cars passing outside her window. Rivera learned her craft from Lisette Model, worked as a photojournalist for the leftist Liberation News Service, and was one of the few women associated with En Foco, the Bronx-based photography collective of the Nuyorican Movement. Her Latino Portrait series was later displayed in the New York City subway—bringing, in her words, “portraits of people like themselves” to the public. El Museo del Barrio, where Rivera held her first solo show in the 1980s, is now giving her the retrospective she never received during her lifetime. —Elena Clavarino