“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.”