William Riera

Lens-based artist, curator, and researcher

I walk cities as a flâneur, though not an innocent one: the wanderer’s freedom to look is also a privilege, and my work tries to keep that in view. Miami, Santiago de Cuba, Havana, Mexico City, and Paris are the cities where I have looked longest — places shaped by migration, by faith, and by the gap between what a city displays and what it keeps quiet. I photograph that gap: a saint in a shop window, a staircase worn by a neighborhood’s daily climb, a pandemic street emptied of its sound, a highway that turns a country into a metaphor. Moving between straight photography, digital intervention, and the archive, I ask who may be seen, where, and on what terms. The photographs are not answers. They are ways of holding that question open.