Carlos Rivera Photography
Working with street photographer Carlos Rivera felt equal parts portrait session and creative collaboration. I’d followed his black-and-white images for years—their candid, architectural eye has a modern-day Vivian Maier quality—so I reached out about something he doesn’t typically list: a family session on the El. He replied with instant enthusiasm, and we built a plan together: start at the Chicago stop, loop the Brown Line, pause at vintage Quincy Station, and mix film with digital for a timeless, city-forward look. The result captured our son’s love of trains and our everyday Chicago life—honest, unfussy, and beautifully composed. In the conversation below, Carlos shares how he found photography, why he gravitates to black and white, how architecture shapes his compositions, what (and who) he loves to photograph, how he spends time off-camera, and the books that fuel his craft—from The Devil in the White City to The Creative Act. He also reflects on slowing down, printing work, and championing storytelling in an AI-speed world.
After our session on the Brown Line, Carlos took the concept and built it into a new offering he now calls his Street Session—a fine-art, Chicago-immersive approach to family and portrait photography. Instead of traditional backdrops or posed setups, he invites clients to “become art,” stepping directly into the rhythm of the city he’s long captured in his street work. These sessions use Chicago as the canvas—its textures, geometry, trains, alleys, and light—creating portraits that feel lived rather than posed. Whether it’s families who want something more modern than park photos, creatives looking for editorial-style portraits, or couples who want a piece of Chicago on their wall, the Street Session blends candid movement with stylized direction. The result is a gallery of images edited with the same care he gives his fine-art work: honest, cinematic, timeless.
Read on for our Q&A.
Photo by Carlos Rivera Photography
How did you get into photography?
Since I was a kid, photography has been around me, from friends who were hobbyists, to relatives that worked in the industry. But it never crossed my mind as something I could do for living. In 2001 I bought my own SLR camera, I specifically bought a fully manual one, a Vivitar V3800N, because I wanted to learn the craft from scratch. At that moment, photography was already my hobby but still nothing I thought as a career. Until later in my life, around 2009, I started my first photography business together with a friend, who was a professional photographer. After some years, we took separate ways but photography was already stuck in my mind as my passion and my career. I haven’t done anything different since then.
Photo by Carlos Rivera Photography
How would you describe your photography aesthetic/style?
Sometimes I use color, when it is needed, but definitely my main style is back and white. I am obsessed with it, it is elegant, timeless and it strips away any distraction and makes it all about contrast, light and shadows. I have a background in architecture and it trained my eye to look for patterns, lines and geometry. I always add context to my photos, usually the city as background almost to the point where the city is the main subject, which in many of my photos it is. I use every element in my photos to create a composition, background, foreground, subject and light and make the frame as perfect as possible.
Photo by Carlos Rivera Photography
What are your favorite people/things/events to photograph?
The city, I love to capture it, I always chasing ordinary scenes where you can see the connection of people with their surrounding. I love to capture people, their expressions, what they do and why they do it, and always the city as the context. Street photography is my daily canvas but portraits are my more intimate outcome.
Photo by Carlos Rivera Photography
What are you doing when you aren't taking photographs?
When I am not behind my camera, editing or developing film, I am playing my guitar, jamming while my dog silently complains about it. I love to spend time with my wife and dog. We love to walk Taco (may dog) in the park. But honestly, most of the time you will find me either taking photos, editing, looking at a photo book, or watching videos in Youtube about other photographers.
Photo by Carlos Rivera Photography
Do you like to read? What's one of your favorite books?
Yes, I do. Last year I read a book that somehow influenced my photography, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. That book made me understand and love this city even more. Because of that, I started a photography collection called Chicago, City Beautiful, my love letter to this city. But probably the book that is always with me, or within reach, is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. This book is my creative bible. It is a collection of thoughts about creativity, its process and how to handle our craft as artists. At first glance this books seems to be just for musicians (As Rick Rubin is one of the most successful music producers), but in reality any creative person, from any field, will find use to his words. It is mind opening, specially nowadays where life pace is so fast that made art craft a fast product.
Photo by Carlos Rivera Photography
Anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered already?
Kudos to you, for what you do. I believe that life is becoming so fast, so immediate, that we need to slow down, and books are a perfect way of doing it and you are promoting this. The same way I always encourage photographers to preserve the original art by printing their photos, you are encouraging people to preserve the art of story telling, the appreciation of a good book and the good writing. I truly believe that in this time of AI, creatives like us are very much needed and we need to balance the fast pace of artificial intelligence and the immediacy of social media. Thanks a lot for this interview Ashley, it is always great to have this kind of conversations with other creatives.
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