[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] The photo above by Christopher Gregory Rivera is one of the “54 photographs from an unforgettable year” in the January 2021 special issue of National Geographic magazine, themed “The Year in Pictures.”

The caption reads: “Honoring Heritage at the Polls: Barbara Liz Cepeda, 44, of Kissimmee, Florida, leads bomba dancers at an early polling place, entertaining voters as they wait in line. Born in Puerto Rico, Cepeda has lived in Florida for 17 years. The eighth-generation bomba dancer started a dance school to honor her mother, Tata Cepeda, and continue a family legacy. Bomba is an Afro-Puerto Rican dance form developed in that U.S. territory by enslaved people who were brought there from West Africa.”

Christopher Gregory Rivera is a Puerto Rican photographer based in New York City. He works extensively on various photographic projects in Puerto Rico and The Americas. His work is particularly interested in examining the residue of power and colonialism. He is a founding member of Blackbox, a visual cooperative that merges the creative processes of photography and design to build immersive stories. He has lectured at the International Center of Photography in New York, in 2019 he was selected for the World Press Photo Foundation Joop Swart Masterclass and in 2020 he was selected as one of The 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch.

His clients include Time Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, Google, The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times, Mother Jones, NPR, Saks 5th Avenue, and A&E Networks.

Gregory Rivera’s photo was part of this National Geographic report in November 2020: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/11/pictures-show-final-days-of-election-like-no-other.

Christopher Gregory Rivera is a Puerto Rican photographer based in New York City. For more about him, visit http://chrisgregory.co and https://www.instagram.com/cgregoryphoto.

For more about Barbara Liz Cepeda, go to https://www.facebook.com/BarbaraLizCepeda and https://www.facebook.com/EscuelaTataCepedaFlorida.