We can imagine it’s sometime around two or three in the morning. Music is blaring — cumbia or punk-rock — yet shards of well-lubricated conversation and laughter manage to steal into the sweaty, smoky air. The moment is buzzing with romantic and sexual chemistry, and intimate scenes are unfolding in the room’s corners.

Somewhere in the crowd, Reynaldo Rivera is clicking the shutter of his camera, chatting with friends, and lovingly documenting all this energy and animation.

Over the 1980s and ’90s, Rivera, a young and self-taught photographer, compiled a vibrant and vivid chronicle of the people, places and moods that shaped the Latino and queer underground scene in Los Angeles at that time. The world that Rivera’s photographs picture is a clandestine one, and Rivera a steward of secrets that we are carefully, partially let in on.

Now, 50 of these images are gathered at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, for “Fistful of Love/También la belleza,” billed as the first solo museum exhibition for an artist who — until his inclusion in the 2020 Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” Biennial and the publication of a monograph of his work that same year — has worked beyond the scrutiny of the art world. Rivera’s images are as intoxicating as the world they picture. Yet, a certain skepticism at my own access to it crept into the frame as I was reminded that this work was made under the radar.

Born in Mexicali, Mexico, in 1964, Rivera grew up working as a migrant farmer and a soup canner alongside his father. The two shuttled between cities on both sides of the border, including Stockton, Pasadena and San Diego de la Union in Mexico’s Guanajuato province. It was against this backdrop of instability that he discovered photography as a teenager while rifling through old photo books and magazines at a bookshop in Stockton.