Retratistas do Morro — Reflections from Serra Community, Belo Horizonte (1970-1990)

The Retratistas do Morro project recognizes and affirms the legitimacy of a national artistic movement that emerged historically in 1960s Brazilian favelas, created by photographers who lived and worked in these territories—acting as keepers of time and memory, in the light of Africa's ancient Griot tradition.

The work of João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta reveals untold versions of Brazil's recent history, offering a perspective on a past systematically erased for centuries—yet no less real, vital and meaningful—presenting the life trajectories, struggles, and triumphs of the country's dispossessed populations, as narrated through their own experiences and worldviews.

 

Within this singular iconography preserving intimate, familiar realities—weddings, birthdays, baptisms, soccer matches, funerals, graduations, and dances—images become territories of existences. Through it, we witness the social, political, economic, and cultural transformations that have defined favela's identity over the last half-century.

 

In a context where symbolic inequality—or the disparity of representation through visual narratives—is as stark as social inequality, João and Afonso found ways to fill a void in the collective imagination. Their records of the lived experiences and emotional memories of entire communities, historically rendered invisible, assert a fundamental truth: all people have an equal right to exist, to their own history, and to the expression of their subjectivities.

 

Let us allow ourselves to be transformed by the power of such beauty.