WALTER FIRMO

… at the heart of silence is the synthesis of the cry of pain

Since early in his career in photography, Walter Firmo has incorporated the notion of the narrative synthesis of a single image, constructed by mounting, directing and frequently staging the scene. From his early days as a photographer, he has challenged and questioned the canons and limits of documentary photography and photojournalism. In a broader sense, he questions photography itself as the mimesis of the real, incorporating into his work new creative, specific and conceptual approaches which value and exalt the object and theme of greatest interest to him in his artistic journey: the representation and visualization of Brazil’s black population.

Walter Firmo was born and raised in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, the only child of migrants from the state of Pará in the north of Brazil. His father came from a black family living on the banks of the lower Amazon, while his mother, born in the city of Belém, came from a white family of Portuguese descent. Since his childhood and adolescence, he has constructed the poetics of his gaze with a focus primarily on producing a broad and generous record of the black population of Rio de Janeiro and the rest of Brazil – their daily lives, their warmth, their religious faith and their celebrations. His work is a true ode to the integrity, pride and resilience of this population and its many cultural manifestations.

In a unique and experimental process to build and define his visual language, he established a direct and innovative dialog with our landscape, population and light in the early 1960s – tropical and transatlantic, rural and urban, sensual and ecstatic. Over the years, his photography has emerged from a true open-air studio, where color is not just his central theme, but a color that reveals Brazil’s black population through both the chromatic intensity of his colorful images and his powerful black and white photographs – most of which are being seen for the first time in this exhibition. Firmo has built an authorial practice that is creative and engaged, focused on all those who are descendants of the violent African diaspora that inescapably marks and molds the past, present and future of this country, weaving and composing “at the heart of silence is the synthesis of the cry of pain.”

Blackness and enchantment, narrative and experimentation. It is these elements that support the multiple poetics that give meaning and place to Walter Firmo’s work.

Born in Rio de Janeiro, descendant of Amazonians, Bahian in spirit, Black and Brazilian by both definition and conviction, in this exhibition Walter Firmo shows us his dense and critical work, an oeuvre that he has built, without interruption, over 70 years, establishing a powerful presence in both the press and authorial photography and resulting in a vast collection of more than 140,000 images, now safeguarded on permanent loan to the Instituto Moreira Salles. The exhibition, initially organized and presented by IMS, in São Paulo, and later shown in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília and Belo Horizonte, now arrives in Salvador through the generous support and partnership of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia.

Sergio Burgi, Curator
Janaina Damaceno Gomes, Assistant Curator

In understanding visual production as a political act, Walter Firmo shows us how “our lives are complex” in the expressiveness of his images through the staging, the colors, his preference for portraying individuals, the naming of his subjects, the themes – family matters, friends matter, love matters, the everyday matters, celebrating matters, iconicity matters. The poverty and beauty portrayed In his works in this room cannot be viewed with a romantic eye, but viscerally.

In a text he wrote in 1989, included in the book Walter Firmo – Antologia fotográfica (Walter Firmo – Photographic Anthology), Firmo describes, speaking in the third-person, his long-standing commitment to overcoming structural racism in Brazil:

“Since the 1960s, he has photographed the black community in Brazil, supporting a social cause that he considers to be above suspicion. Already a hybrid of Joseph and Mary – his parents – he works within this society silently, with the discretion of a monk, without any fuss, inducing honor, pride and dignity in Black Brazilians. This desire for justice can be traced to his origins in Irajá where he was conceived and in São Cristóvão when, still a boy, he lived in the open doors of the streets of Cordovil, Madureira, Parada de Lucas, Vila Rosely, Vaz Lobo, Oswaldo Cruz, Marechal Hermes, Coelho Neto, Bangu, Nilópolis and Cachambi – all places of seduction, wonder and magic under the sun and the suburban stars, enchanted horizons to his child’s gaze.”

Walter Firmo’s visual style comes, above all, from the North of Rio de Janeiro, his place of origin and where a privileged sociability of the black community thrived, especially through samba, another Pequena África in the city, as well as the many others that he encountered in his trips around the world.

It is the authority of the vision that creates unreality.

On the contrary, Walter Firmo’s works portray possible realities, possible destinations for each of us. Maybe because of that, his individual portraits have become classic images. Clementina de Jesus, Pixinguinha, Dona Ivone Lara, Cartola, Candeia, Ismael Silva are, in his words, “icons of the people.” The notion of “icon” come from religion. They are images intended for worship, which, as American author Nicole Fleetwood points out, are not “only a representation of the sacred, but are in themselves a way of prayer.” For her, iconic Black personalities, who in popular culture are celebrities with the ability to sustain their position at the heart of the cultural circuit, are “part of the production and the circuit of a race narrative” and, as such, always in dispute.

If, in a racist society, the norm is hatred and self-hatred, the works of authors such as bell hooks, Frantz Fanon and Virginia Bicudo show us that to love Blackness is a necessary part of healing. It is not by chance that Firmo defines the color in his work in terms of affection, with a focus on Black people, but also on the other subjects he chose to photograph.

Without a doubt, first learning photography at home with his father, José, a cosmopolitan black Amazonian man, had a profound impact on Walter Firmo’s attempts to position himself in society. Perhaps there he also learned a lesson in this state of love claimed by him and by Black authors such as bell hooks.

In the mid 1960s, Walter Firmo’s investigations into the photographic language brought him into close proximity with, for example, works such as the works of Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, especially those which resort to drama and staging.
Taking as a direct reference classical paintings – for Firmo, those of Alberto da Veiga Guignard and Heitor of Prazeres; for Wall, those of Eugène Delacroix and Edouard Manet – many of the works of both photographers are constructed through portraiture and staging, consciously made by fusing staged and directed scenes with the frontrality and uniqueness of the figurative and direct documentation which is characteristic of the photographic process.
These images incorporate an expanded time that contrasts with the instantaneous and narrative fragmentation of the direct documentary record, abolishing the presence of the out-of-frame and the need to contextualize the image which is witness to the scene. They emphasize, in contrast, the quality of the eminently pictorial elements within the framing of the image, organized by the photographer and carefully arranged around a theatrical and preconceived narrative.
During this process, Firmo built many of his images by organizing and juxtaposing characters, backgrounds and objects in open-air or interior spaces, portrayed in specific configurations.
Scenes directed by him, always affectionate, intense and vibrant, produce iconic images such as those of Pixinguinha, Joao da Baiana and Clementina, taken for a report on samba in Rio published in Manchete in 1967. Or the portraits of his parents, accompanied by their grandchildren, based on Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s paintings Família do fuzileiro naval (Family of a Naval Marine) and Os noivos (The Bride and Groom).
Many of his portraits of less known or anonymous characters are also iconic, such as the black and white image of a fisherman in a rocking chair, bringing into the pictorial field a formal and creative proposition to be revealed and established in the confrontation and dialog between the work and the observer/spectator.
Role-play, uniqueness and the vernacular merge into the poetic language constructed by Firmo during his career.

Walter Firmo - A Short Timeline

Andrea Wanderley

1937
Born in Irajá, a district in the north of the city of Rio de Janeiro, on June 1, Walter Firmo Guimaraes da Silva was the only son of José Baptista da Silva and Maria de Lourdes Guimaraes da Silva from Paraná. According to Firmo, he grew up “under the suburban stars at the time of Méier”.

1952-1954
Starts to become interested in photography and gets his first Rolleiflex. Does a course at the Brazilian Association of Photographic Art (ABAF). Photographs his family and colleagues from school and the neighborhood. Frequents the bookstore and magazine stand at Santos Dumont airport, where he browses international illustrated magazines such as Life, Paris Match and Oggi, analyzing the work of foreign photojournalists. Avid reader of the Brazilian illustrated magazine O Cruzeiro, which included work by photographers such as José Medeiros, Luciano Carneiro and Jean Manzon.

1955-1959
Starts work at the newspaper Última Hora. first as an apprentice and then as a professional photographer. Publishes weekly articles in the column “Behind the Goal” between 1957 and 1959.

1957
Serves in the 1st Army Infantry Regiment, where he meets the journalist and future musical critic Sérgio Cabral. Meets him again around 1959, when Cabral is working as a reporter for the Rio newspaper Diário Carioca. Firmo credits him and the composer and poet Hermínio Bello de Carvalho for his introduction and access to the world of samba.

1960
Starts working at the newspaper Jornal do Brasil in January, when the new graphic design was being introduced, with a strong emphasis on photography. He work is featured on the front page of the newspaper.

1961
Participates in the first national photojournalism exhibition, in the concourse of Santos Dumont airport.

1963
Aloisio Firmo, his son with Maria do Carmo, born on August 6.

1964
Publishes the series of reports 100 dias na Amazônia de ninguém (100 Days in No Man’s Amazon) in the Caderno B supplement of the Jornal do Brasil, with his texts and images. Receives the Esso Reporting Award of 1963 for this work, the third award won by professionals from the Jornal do Brasil.

1965
Leaves the Jornal of Brazil and joins the team at the new magazine Realidade in São Paulo.

1966
Realidade is launched in April. The reportage “Brasileiros Go Home” by Firmo and Luis Fernando Mercadante is published in the first edition and wins the magazine its first Esso Journalism Award. Returns to Rio to work at the magazine Manchete. Seeing American photographer David Drew Zingg’s photo essays in the magazine, he starts to work with color photography, in which he will become a virtuoso.

1967
Eduardo Firmo, his son with Dionéia, is born on January 5.
Takes his iconic photographs of musician Pixinguinha in his backyard while working on an article for Manchete with reporter Muniz Sodré. Works for Editora Bloch in New York as a correspondent for the magazine for about six months, reporting on the USA, Mexico, Canada, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean countries. Influenced by the black power movement, he grows his hair into the Black is Beautiful style. On returning to Brazil, he becomes more active in the fight against racial discrimination, taking iconic images of important names in black culture and always valuing the black population in his photography.

1971
He is cited in the “Photography” article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Leaves Manchete and turns freelance.

1972
Starts photographing for the recording industry and starts photographing Brazil’s traditional festivals. Works for the magazine Veja as a freelance photographer.

1973
Founds the photographic agency Câmera 3 with Klaus Mayer and Sebastian Barbosa, leaving it in 1974. Between 1973 and 1982, he wins seven awards in Nikon’s International Photography Competition.

1974
Works for Veja from 1974 to 1979. The book As escolas de samba: o quê, quem, como, quando e por quê (Samba schools: What, Who, How, When and Why), by Sérgio Cabral, with photos by Walter Firmo and preface by Lucio Rangel, is published by Editora Fontana.

1979-1980
Works for about nine months for the magazine Tênis Sport, published by Rio Gráfica, taking the cover photograph for the first edition: “Pelé with two tennis balls in the place of his eyes”.

1979
Photographs the singer Clementina de Jesus in her home in Lins de Vasconcelos.

1981-1984
Works for state-owned companies such as Furnas and Petrobras as a freelance photographer, as well as for the recording industry.

1982
Publishes a set of 24 black and white postcards with photographers Cafi, Pedro de Moraes and Miguel Rio Branco entitled Os brasileiros (The Brazilians), with an introduction by Darcy Ribeiro.

1983
Ensaio no tempo (Essay in Time), a retrospective exhibition of 200 of his color and black and white photographs from the last 25 years curated by Zeka Araujo, is shown at The Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition was then shown in São Paulo, Fortaleza, Buenos Aires, Curitiba, Havana and Cabo Verde.

1984
Organizes the Photography Workshop of the 3rd National Week of Photography in Fortaleza and the workshop How to Make a Photo Reportagem in the 3rd Latin American Photography Colloquium in Havana, Cuba.

1985
At the invitation of João Farkas, at the time Editor-in-Chief of Photography for the magazine IstoÉ, he started working in the magazine’s branch offices in Rio de Janeiro in July, remaining until July 1986. Photographs personalities such as Paulo Moura and Celso Furtado. The July 31, 1985, issue of IstoÉ, publishes the article “Quando explode a vida” (When Life Explodes) about Arthur Bispo do Rosário, the first article about the artist in the mainstream press.
Wins the Government of the State of Rio de Janeiro’s Golden Dolphin Award, in the Photography category, for the “sensitivity of his photographs, especially the poetic of the Brazilian people and their reality”.

1986
Appointed Director of the National Institute of Photography by the Minister of Culture, Celso Furtado, a position he will hold until 1991.
The exhibition Espelho rebelde: fotografia brasileira contemporânea (Rebel Mirror: Brazilian Contemporary Photography], curated by Pedro Vasquez and including works from 12 Brazilian photographers, including Firmo, opens during Photography Month in Paris. The exhibition is shown at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in 1990.

1987
Appointed Adviser to the National Copyright Council.

1989
Walter Firmo: Antonoliga fotográfica (Walter Firmo: A Photographic Anthology) published by Editora Dazibao.

1990
Travels to Aquila, Italy, to support presentations by Brazilian musicians such as Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil at the Last Cry Ecological Festival. Firmo and the visual artist Rubens Gerchman hold exhibitions in Moscow in September.

1991
Returns to working as a freelance. The work of various photographers, including Bob Wolfenson, Claudia Andujar, Mario Cravo Neto, Maureen Bisilliat, Otto Stupakoff, Sebastian Salgado and Walter Firmo are shown at the first exhibition of the Pirelli/São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) Photography Collection. After the exhibition, the images are incorporated in the Pirelli Collection, which forms part of MASP’s collection.

1992
Starts teaching photography at FotoRiografia, a school run by Ivan Lima in Rio de Janeiro. In honor of the centenary of the writer Graciliano Ramos, holds an exhibition at the Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro, with photographs that follow the writer’s journey in Maceió, Palmeira dos Índios and Quebrângulo. The June Festival in Zurich includes an exhibition of several Brazilian photographers, including Firmo and Rogério Reis. Participates in the Fotofest Festival in Houston, USA. Joins photographers Ana Jobim, Luiz Garrido and Peter Feibert at the Econews Brasil agency.

1993
Travels from Parintins to the island of Marajó from June to December, to portray the people and nature of the Amazon region. The resulting works are shown in the exhibition Ribeiros amazônicos (Amazonian Riversides) in Belém, and then in Rio de Janeiro. Creates the project Photo in Cena, resulting from the meeting of photographers during a course taught by Firmo. Over the years, the project hosts events, and sets up a school and photographic agency. The book Cadeia (Prison), written by Clara Ramos about her mother, the writer Graciliano Ramos, and illustrated with photographs by Walter Firmo, is published.

1994
Participates in the exhibition Ruas do Rio – Caminhos da história (The Streets of Rio – A Journey through History) at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center. Teaches in the journalism course at Faculdade Cândido Mendes and also at the Escola Foto in Cena, now the Ateliê da Imagem. Opens the solo exhibitions Achados e perdidos (Lost and Found) at the Cândido Mendes Gallery and Paixão e morte segundo Walter Firmo (Love and Death According to Walter Firmo) at the Centro Cultural da Light, both in Rio de Janeiro. Curates the 1st FINEP Photojournalism Salon.
Rejoining FUNART, he returns to working in the Photography Department, retiring in 2007. Participates in the collective exhibition O negro brasileiro (Black Brazilians) at the University of Miami, Florida.

1995
His photographs are included in the exhibition Fotografia contemporânea brasileira (Contemporary Brazilian Photography) of works in the Joaquim Paiva collection, at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro. One of the first group of artists to leave their handprints on the Wall of Fame at the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro, together with Anselmo Duarte, Paulinho da Viola, Emilinha Borba and Jô Soares.

1996
The book Nas trilhas do Rosa (On The Tracks of Rosa) is published by Editora Scritta, with photos by Firmo and text by the journalist Fernando Granato. They retraced the steps of writer Guimaraes Rosa as he hiked through the back country of Minas Gerais, using the writer’s notebook as a guide.

1997
The movie O Brasil de Walter Firmo (Walter Firmo’s Brazil), directed by Ana Lopes, is shown at the Cinemateca of the Museum of Modern Art during the Festival Nacional/Brasilidade. The solo exhibition O Brasil de Walter Firmo is shown at the Arte Hoje Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, followed by another solo exhibition Pixinguinha e outros batutas (Pixinguinha and Other Beats) at the Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo.

1999
Spends six months in Paris during his Banco Icatu Arts Fellowship. He studies French for the first two months and then spends the next four months taking photographs of the city. The results are shown the following year in an exhibition Paris, parada sobre imagens (Paris, Stop for Images) at the Debret Gallery in Paris.

2000
Curates the Contemporary Photography section of the exhibition Negro de corpo e alma (Black, Body and Soul) for the Redescobrimento Brasil + 500 anos (The Rediscovery of Brazil + 500 Years) exhibition in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo. In October, the exhibition Inéditos de Walter Firmo (Walter Firmo’s Unseen Works) opens at the Camara Clara Gallery in Rio de Janeiro.

2001
Delivers the opening lecture for the photography workshop at the Casa das Artes da Mangueira. Participates in the collective exhibition Negras memórias, memórias de negros – O imaginário luso-afro-brasileiro e a herança da escravidão (Dark Memories, Memories of Blacks – the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Imaginary and the Inheritance of Slavery) at the National History Museum, organized by Emanoel Araujo and shown the following year at the SESI Art Gallery in São Paulo. The book for the exhibition Paris: parada sobre imagens is published by FUNARTE, with photographs by Firmo. The exhibition is then shown in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and the following year in Brasilia, Belém and Vitória.

2002
Release of the short film Pequena África (Small Africa), conceived and directed by Zózimo Bulbul, with Firmo as the Director of Photography. Between 2002 and 2007, frequents and photographs religious cults of African origin.

2003
Solo exhibition Um passeio pela nobreza (A Walk Through Nobility) of informal photos of Brazilian MPB musicians such as Cartola, Chico Buarque, Clementina de Jesus, Paulinho da Viola and Pixinguinha opens in the Pequena Gallery 18 in Rio de Janeiro. Firmo and photographer Haruo Ohara are honored at the Pirelli/Masp Collection exhibition at the Casa França-Brasil.

2004
Receives the Commendation of the Order of Rio Branco from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Commendation of the Order of Cultural Merit from the Ministry of Culture. Gives photography workshops in France and Cuba, where he produces the photographic essay Românticos de Cuba (Cuban Romantics). Is one of the photographers included in the exhibition Dez artistas nota dez (Ten Artists Ten Out of Ten) at the José Boniface Center in Gamboa, Rio de Janeiro,

2005
The book Firmo fotografia (Firmo Photography), edited by Lélia Coelho Frota, is published by Bem-Te-Vi. The exhibition Impressões digitais (Digital Prints [literally, “Fingerprints”]) opens in the SENAC Center for Culture and Communication Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, showing digital photographs taken by Farmo during a trip to southern Brazil. Receives the Orilaxé 2005 Commendation from the Afro Reggae Cultural Group, in honor of his work dedicated to Brazilian black culture.

2006
Is interviewed for the series Depoimentos para a posteridade (Testimonials for Posterity), produced by the Museum of Image and Sound of Rio de Janeiro. Takes part in the exhibition Black is Beautiful at the Amsterdam International Photography Biennale.

2007
Curates and exhibits in the exhibition No ventre azul e branco – Tempo de Iemanjá (In the Blue and White Belly – The Time of Iemanjá) at the Federal Courts Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro. Exhibits hitherto unseen works at the LGC Contemporary Art Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, in celebration of his 50 years as a photographer. The book Álbum de retratos: Walter Firmo (Portrait Album: Walter Firmo), edited by Cora Rónai, is published by Editora Mauad.

2008
The book Brasil: imagens da terra e do povo (Brazil: Images of the Land and its People), edited by Emanoel Araujo, is published by the Imprensa Oficial de São Paulo. Curates the book África em nós (Africa in Us), published by Editora Assaoc. The exhibition Corpo e alma (Body and Soul) opens at the Imã Gallery in São Paulo.

2010
Participates in the Back 2 Black Festival at Estação Leopoldina in Rio de Janeiro.

2012
Appointed Tourism Ambassador for Rio de Janeiro.

2013
The book Walter Firmo – Um olhar sobre Bispo do Rosário (Walter Firmo – A View of Bispo do Rosário), edited by Flávia Corpas, is published by Nau Editora.

2018
The exhibition O Brasil que merece o Brasil (The Brazil that Brazil Deserves) opens at the Vale Cultural Center, in São Luís, Maranhão. In May, Walter Firmo’s photographic archive of about 140,000 images is housed at the Instituto Moreira Salles on permanent loan.

2019
Work starts on organizing the collection at the Instituto Moreira Salles and Firmo records his first testimonies about his life and work, in videos produced by photographer Egberto Nogueira.

2020-2021
Self-isolating during the pandemic, he continues to work remotely and intensively on organizing his collection. In parallel, he shares photographs taken on his mobile phone in the social media.

2022
Exhibition and catalog Walter Firmo – No verbo do silêncio a síntese do grito (Walter Firmo – From the Silent Word to the Expression of the Cry) opens at the IMS Paulista and CCBB Rio de Janeiro, in commemoration of his 70 years of uninterrupted photography.

2023
Opening of the exhibition Walter Firmo – No verbo do silêncio a síntese do grito (Walter Firmo – From the Silent Word to the Expression of the Cry) at the CCBB in Brasília and Belo Horizonte; and at MAM in Salvador.

Walter Firmo’s work cannot be seen as simply a celebration of Brazilianness or popular culture. He shows us that the history of Brazil’s Black population is rooted in the hardest and most extreme racism and inequality. More than a record of Brazilianness, Firmo’s cosmopolitanism is seen in what Suely Carneiro calls the patrimony of world Black culture, be it in his images of Brazil or in the results of his travels to Cuba, Jamaica, the USA and Cabo Verde.

To admire the color of his work in isolation is sterile. We need to engage politically with the figures he depicts, and that is why we need to ask ourselves if it is possible to universalize humanity on the basis of the Black figures that Firmo brings to us, or if we always have to resort to the concept of Brazilianness, of racial mixing, of Brazil as a nation, as a license to admire his work without injuring the colonial pride of whiteness.

Walter Firmo was 30 years old when he spent a period in New York as a correspondent for the magazine Manchete. One day, the editor-in-chief showed Firmo a message he had received from a journalist in Brazil. The journalist wrote that he did not understand how Editora Bloch could have sent an “bad professional, who is illiterate, and black” as an international correspondent.

The reaction to this explicit episode of racism came in the form of indignation and his immediate embracing of the slogan “black is beautiful!” at two levels: in his own body, by adopting the Afro hairstyle; and in his photography, building over the last 50 years, one of the most beautiful visual journeys dedicated to the black population of the world. In a report published in 2011 in the newspaper Gazeta do Povo, Firmo said:
“It was the time of the Pill, of the Beatles, of Woodstock, of “black is beautiful”. I let my hair grow, and started the political part of my work. I went to the streets, to the factories, to the profane parties and for the musicians, always emphasizing blackness. But my approach was never to use the verbal, to speak out loud. I work in a dumb language. My photography embraces this. Through the subtlety of that language, I can make it cry.”

Living in the United States in 1967, at the height of the civil rights debate, Firmo came into contact with the work of black photographers, such as Gordon Parks and, in a few years, his work together with that of Parks, James Van Zee, Moneta Sleet, Carrie Mae Weems, Januário Garcia, Peter Magubane, Seydou Keïta, Santu Mofokeng, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, among others, changed the history of world photography.
Like them, Firmo understands that it is necessary to “love Blackness,” as bell hooks proposes. She explores the impact of the “odious images” of the Black in the construction of our subjectivity and states that it is imperative to change the field of visual production that allows black people to access a broader repertoire of representations of themselves.
Firmo and the other photographers cited are some of the people who have played and continue to play a decisive role in building that change.

“Today this country is a photographic forge, born generously under the blessing of tropical light, leaving our people impervious and revealing dreamlike, earthy chimeras. And, if this light bursts through translucent shadows – in another code – a new relationship between man and time is revealed in blinding clarity. Luxuriant, aphrodisiac, the color of Brazil embraces a so-libertine sensuality, expelling unashamedly lascivious lightening strokes, vitrifying the tonalities of the corners of all five regions.”

Walter Firmo

Iconicity, light and transcendence are all to be found in Firmo’s work, in both his individual and collective powerful symbolic portraits and in his images with their constantly repeating and distinctive characteristics. From a study and comparison of the images in his vast collection of works, mosaics formed from different images soon appear, especially of the celebrations of popular culture of African roots. Frequently, Firmo composes these photographs by cropping, the use of graphic devices and contrasting colors and lights, forming and juxtaposing new graphical elements and dialogs between images impregnated with traces.

These traces, as Vanessa R. L. de Souza suggests, are “of an ancient Africa, deconstructed by internal conflicts generated by the occupations of the British, German, Belgian, French and others. Traces of collective or individual memories brought by each enslaved being arriving in Brazil. Traces of knowledge transmitted through oral tradition. Traces of Black inventiveness in Brazil over the centuries, from their experience of the so-called New World.”

In direct dialog with his own and specific process for producing the images is his choice of cromo slide film, using an analogue photographic process that best represents the range and amplitude of different light intensities and color saturations. The images are assessed, selected and edited by the photographer after laboratory processing, directly on light tables specifically designed for this purpose. All stages of the process revolve around and through light itself. As Firmo points out, “working with this light is to emphasize the vigor of the magnificent, celebrating the scenes and their infinite backgrounds through color, in the everyday pomp and pageantry that is the paradise here.”

This segment of the exhibition is dedicated exclusively to Walter Firmo’s black and white photography. It is a unique opportunity to enjoy work that is still little known and largely unseen until now, especially its aesthetic, formal and authorial nature, establishing a direct dialog with Firmo’s vast color output.

While color is one of the central features of Firmo’s work, it is not the only one. In understanding visual production as a political act, it is with the expressiveness of his images through the staging, the colors, his preference for the portrait, the naming of his subjects and the themes that he shows how “our lives are complex.”

As can be seen in the images here, Firmo’s commitment to Blackness extends to his black and white work. Firmo produces notable photographic series, such as the images of the world of MPB, which include images of Clementina de Jesus, Pixinguinha and Cartola, among others, many to be seen in video on this floor. Taken in the first half of the 1960s, they precede the iconic color images of those same artists, which Firmo would take years later.

These resonate with the other black and white series on the themes of affection and the personal and cultural strength of those he portrayed, as well as the traditional celebrations and expressions of popular culture in various regions of Brazil. They reveal in Walter Firmo both the narrative power of the single image – constructed, staged and theatrical – as well as the strength of the direct and narrative documentary photograph when used to examine the opposite, the contra-visual and an absence of visual appeal.

Other important series of photographs are shown for the first time in this exhibition, such as that produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s at Piatã Beach in Salvador. For many years, Firmo photographed in one of the principal resorts used by the Black population of the Bahian capital in the 6 x 6 cm format, capturing scenes of the daily enjoyment of that space by Black families, couples, young people and children, all of them making full use of a public space apparently devoid of the elements and signs that characterize structural racism in Brazil. Viewed together, the images appear to function in a reality that is unreal. While they are certainly documentary and direct, they also build a narrative that has an air of the surreal, by confronting the naturalized and hegemonic look that constructs and sustains the prevailing narratives of Brazil’s racial and social structure, which systematically exclude and render invisible the possibility of scenes such as those revealed by Firmo in Piatã.

With a poetic that is his own, Walter Firmo’s photography builds, in its multiple strands, the syntaxes and syntheses of messages capable of penetrating social and cultural structures, transforming them.

The short film Pequena África [Little Africa], directed by Zózimo Bulbul, was released in 2002. Firmo was the Director of Photography. The cast includes the actor and film director Waldir Onofre, known for directing the film As aventuras amorosas de um padeiro [The Loving Adventures of a Baker] (1975); Douglas Silva – famous for the role of Dadinho in Cidade de Deus [City of God] (2002); and Flávia Souza da Cruz, an acttress, singer, producer and one of the founders of the Aqualtune Association of Black Women (RJ).

Zózimo, as well as being an actor and director, was the creator of the Afro Carioca Film Center (2006) and the Brazil, Africa, Caribbean and other Diasporas Black Cinema Encounter (2007). The rapprochement of the two is an important political gesture on both sides. At that time, Zózimo was already a well-known black movement activist and one of the top Brazilian filmmakers. The encounter between Zózimo and Firmo is the encounter of two of the greatest expressions of afrovisuality in the diaspora.

2002 is an emblematic year for Brazilian cinema, but also for black activism. The issue of introducing quotas for black students in university admission processes was under public discussion, and the new policy started to be implemented in institutions such as The State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). In this context, “returning” to Pequena África was important. It was to go back to where it all started for most who arrived on this side of the Atlantic. It was the invocation of what is now called Ancestry. It was political.

In the opening scenes of Pequena África, we hear “Cordeiro de Nanã” and we see a wide shot of the facade of the Church of Sant’Ana, in Praça Onze in the center of Rio de Janeiro. Soon after, Douglas Silva introduces Pequena África neighborhood and appears talking to Tia Jurema, a long-time resident of this region of the city, which received more than a million enslaved Africans in its port. They are Walter Firmo’s first cinematic images. The framing, the color, the temporality of the film clearly have his signature.