What happens when we photograph labor?
Photojournalist Ryan Christopher Jones writes that photojournalists have a responsibility to portray the realities of the world while maintaining their subjects’ humanity. However, photojournalists may veer off this course, such as during the United States crack epidemic in the late 1980s, where “ubiquitous pictures of poor, black drug users, living in squalor and driven by desperation” became the norm.$^1$ How can photographers, then, document history without exploiting their subjects?
This exhibit documents the evolution in the portrayal of the Black Brazilian working class by photographers and photojournalists. By curating images from renowned photojournalists and native Black Brazilians, this exhibit seeks to explore historic representations of the Black working class, contextualize changes in depictions of Black labor, and provide alternate and subversive portraits of labor-class afro-brasileños today. Criticizing the role of photography in the development and portrayal of the Black labor class in Brazil provides insight into the ethics of photojournalism and allows analysis of shifts in labor performed by afro-brasileños.
Similar to the evolution of the image, whose first iterations involved photosensitive paper and rudimentary film rolls and now stretch to include light data from solid-state semiconductors and artificial intelligence-generated images, the Black Brazilian labor-class has evolved with time. This exhibit connects the evolution of the image with the evolution of Afro-Brazilian labor, conducted through photography.
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FIRST EXPOSURE introduces the history of photojournalism in Black Brazil, focusing on the labor of enslaved Black Brazilians and the function of photography as propaganda. The work of the prolific photographers Marc Ferrez, an arm of Dom Pedro II’s government in the 1840s, and Augusto Malta, an employee of the mayor of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1900s, attempts to legitimize and repackage slavery and to frame the history of the plantation and mining economies. These propaganda movements are contrasted with photographs showing the persistence of Black Brazilian religion in the face of constant violence from enslavers and landowners during the sharecropping era. Photojournalists capture the candomblé group Irmandade da Boa Marte in sites of worship with Catholic aesthetics, an outward symbolism critical for the survival of the religion.
DEVELOPER explores the changing faces and landscapes of Black labor in Brazil. In a nation with much of the population concentrated in dense urban areas, this section highlights Black agrarian labor and contrasts it with industrial and urban labor. Film photos featuring diffuse and harsh light and unique composition from David Vestal’s series of work in Bahia converse with Sebastião Salgado’s exposures of industrial labor in gold strip mines and the homes laborers return to in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Although often included in the labor class in Brazil in and in every country in the world, the labor of children is either considered permissible or dismissed as negligible; here, the labor and lives of Black Brazilian children is front and center with images from Miguel Rio Branco and Henri Ballot. Whether it be urban or agrarian labor, the marginalization and feminization of certain spheres of labor, such as child-rearing and home-making, is featured in a conversation with Angélica Dass, an award-winning Black Brazilian photographer.
GENERATION terminates the exhibit, moving photography of Brazilian labor beyond the production of capital and towards the creation of community. Political activism as a mechanism for community creation is explored in Lázaro Roberto’s exposures of Black revolutionary movements in contemporary Brazilian history. Black joy as a mechanism of resistance against the confines of capital production is explored through the warm and softly lit photos of Walter Firmo. My own exposures of the Black Brazilian diaspora in the Bay Area expands Black Brazilian expression in photography beyond labor and strife and pain and towards life. Members of the Samba Funky Dance School in Oakland, their vibrant purple and yellow plumes shifting in the wind and their considerable rhinestones catching light, posed for portraits, freezing their cultural expression in the history of Oakland and the Black Brazilian diaspora.
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