Walter Firmo, the photographer who exalts the beauty of black Brazil

The United States was in full swing for the civil rights movement when Walter Firmo (84 years old, Rio de Janeiro) landed in New York as a graphic correspondent for a Brazilian magazine.

It was a brief stay, but those months of 1968 —a year that revolutionized the world— forever changed the look of the carioca towards himself and towards his country.

He discovered the

movement .

He grew out his curls, proud of his hair, and devoted the rest of his career to extolling the beauty of black Brazilians and his culture with vivid images.

The Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) of São Paulo reviews the career of this great Brazilian photographer in the exhibition

, recently inaugurated and that can be visited until September 11.

The exhibition brings together more than 260 works by the octogenarian artist, who began his career in photojournalism at the age of 15, became an artist and is still active.

Among the works, a poetic image taken in 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, with a mobile phone in line at a bank.

Most of them are color images —his hallmark of his identity—, but he also includes some in black and white.

Discovering the power of color was also transcendental.

In his photographs, the intense, dazzling tones share the limelight with those portrayed.

The artist explains that the choice of hot colors is the result of the geographical location of Brazil, crossed by the line of Ecuador.

“Here is the ultimate solar exaltation.

If I lived in Iceland, I would not photograph in color, I would be a black and white photographer”, he states in an interview with IMS.

The exhibition, "Walter Firmo, in the verb of silence the synthesis of the scream" brings together more than 260 pieces by the photographer. Lela Beltrão

This kind of New York epiphany changed his perspective.

From then on, she began "to practice photography in a political way," she recalls, emphasizing the word political.

He placed Brazilian descendants of slaves, like himself, at the center of his work.

Before his lens, musicians, the most renowned samba players, workers, the Carnival, folkloric, religious festivals were posing... A universe that no one had looked at with those eyes: the carnivalesque on a bus on the way to the parade, the dignity of a vegetable vendor or of an old woman in a favela, the majestic pose of the samba singer Clementina de Jesus, the composer Pixinguinha with his saxophone in the privacy of his garden or the spectacular popular festivals of African origin.

I wanted to extol the existence of black Brazilians, to show them as people of honor, hardworking, pretty, beautiful, social totems... "This country called Brazil was built with the work of blacks, the whites who came from Europe enslaved them."

For the conquerors, “the indigenous people were indolent.

The black, on the other hand, was an animal that could work very hard.”

His descendants — more than half of Brazilians today — deserved to be portrayed without prejudice, in all their splendor.

He himself discovered racism in New York after the indignant phone call his boss received from an envious colleague: How is it possible that you have hired an illiterate, bad person... and black photographer!

It was a shock, a humiliation, he says.

Because Firmo, the only son of a black soldier born in the Amazon and a light-skinned descendant of Portuguese, had grown up among whites in Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s.

He had never suffered a racist attack.

Until arriving in the United States, where racial segregation by law had just been abolished, the artist firmly believed that Brazil was an example of cordial relations between the races.

The myth of the so-called racial democracy that sought to camouflage systemic racism.

“I went out for coffee with milk, but I consider myself black, not white,” he says.

After photographing the rich variety of popular festivals of African origin from very different corners of Brazil, he has come to the following conclusion: Religious festivals will endure thanks to faith, which remains well rooted;

On the other hand, the folkloric ones have their days numbered because the disinterest of the youth is great.

A visitor walks through the sample.

Lela Beltrao

Among his works as a photojournalist, a great report made six decades ago stands out, but as relevant now as in 1964:

.

He wanted a young reporter to accompany him, but since the kid had no contract or insurance, the paper didn't want to risk drowning or being bitten by a snake.

So he went alone for three months to see the homeland of his father, the communities that inhabit the largest tropical forest in the world.

He took the photographs and wrote the text.

Firmo has also dedicated a substantial part of his career to training thousands of photographers, teaching them to look, to capture what surrounds them.

The veteran photographer divides professionals into three categories: the thief, who steals a moment without permission or planning;

the engineer, who works with the plans to capture an almost emotionless moment;

and the invisible, which "is like a film director," he says, who achieves a good frame without sacrificing the emotion of the moment.

He made his debut in the profession in the forties, during a family vacation on the beaches of Recife, in the northeast of Brazil.

He was an eight year old boy;

the camera, a very basic Kodak.

“'Don't chop our heads off,'” my father said as he posed with my mother.

"That stayed in my memory."

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