It is the authority of the vision that creates unreality.
On the contrary, Walter Firmo’s works portray possible realities, possible destinations for each of us. Maybe because of that, his individual portraits have become classic images. Clementina de Jesus, Pixinguinha, Dona Ivone Lara, Cartola, Candeia, Ismael Silva are, in his words, “icons of the people.” The notion of “icon” come from religion. They are images intended for worship, which, as American author Nicole Fleetwood points out, are not “only a representation of the sacred, but are in themselves a way of prayer.” For her, iconic Black personalities, who in popular culture are celebrities with the ability to sustain their position at the heart of the cultural circuit, are “part of the production and the circuit of a race narrative” and, as such, always in dispute.
If, in a racist society, the norm is hatred and self-hatred, the works of authors such as bell hooks, Frantz Fanon and Virginia Bicudo show us that to love Blackness is a necessary part of healing. It is not by chance that Firmo defines the color in his work in terms of affection, with a focus on Black people, but also on the other subjects he chose to photograph.
Without a doubt, first learning photography at home with his father, José, a cosmopolitan black Amazonian man, had a profound impact on Walter Firmo’s attempts to position himself in society. Perhaps there he also learned a lesson in this state of love claimed by him and by Black authors such as bell hooks.