Walter Firmo’s work cannot be seen as simply a celebration of Brazilianness or popular culture. He shows us that the history of Brazil’s Black population is rooted in the hardest and most extreme racism and inequality. More than a record of Brazilianness, Firmo’s cosmopolitanism is seen in what Suely Carneiro calls the patrimony of world Black culture, be it in his images of Brazil or in the results of his travels to Cuba, Jamaica, the USA and Cabo Verde.
To admire the color of his work in isolation is sterile. We need to engage politically with the figures he depicts, and that is why we need to ask ourselves if it is possible to universalize humanity on the basis of the Black figures that Firmo brings to us, or if we always have to resort to the concept of Brazilianness, of racial mixing, of Brazil as a nation, as a license to admire his work without injuring the colonial pride of whiteness.