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.