BRONXTONES

A photographer born and resident in the Bronx offers glimpses of his borough’s places and people.

Rivera styles himself “The Bronxer” on his website and social media. Though only some of the captions (“Bruckner Orange,” “174th Violet”) place his eight sunny but generic outdoor scenes in any specific locale, still the cute young children of color in most of them supply plenty of charisma. In a bilingual narrative on each recto, equally generic English lines over Spanish highlight colors in the facing photo with changes of hue: “We buy tamales from the green cart. / Compramos tamales del carrito verde.” An intrusive white Polaroid-style frame collaged into each photo serves no evident purpose beyond framing one element of the composition and supplying a place for a caption, brand emblem, and an ID number. This gives this board-book minigallery a commercial feel…but it’s never a bad thing to celebrate the fact that there’s more to New York City’s northerly reaches than a zoo and a baseball stadium.

More tribute than tour, but diapered viewers, Bronxers or not, will respond to the bright colors and faces.