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.