This segment of the exhibition is dedicated exclusively to Walter Firmo’s black and white photography. It is a unique opportunity to enjoy work that is still little known and largely unseen until now, especially its aesthetic, formal and authorial nature, establishing a direct dialog with Firmo’s vast color output.
While color is one of the central features of Firmo’s work, it is not the only one. In understanding visual production as a political act, it is with the expressiveness of his images through the staging, the colors, his preference for the portrait, the naming of his subjects and the themes that he shows how “our lives are complex.”
As can be seen in the images here, Firmo’s commitment to Blackness extends to his black and white work. Firmo produces notable photographic series, such as the images of the world of MPB, which include images of Clementina de Jesus, Pixinguinha and Cartola, among others, many to be seen in video on this floor. Taken in the first half of the 1960s, they precede the iconic color images of those same artists, which Firmo would take years later.
These resonate with the other black and white series on the themes of affection and the personal and cultural strength of those he portrayed, as well as the traditional celebrations and expressions of popular culture in various regions of Brazil. They reveal in Walter Firmo both the narrative power of the single image – constructed, staged and theatrical – as well as the strength of the direct and narrative documentary photograph when used to examine the opposite, the contra-visual and an absence of visual appeal.
Other important series of photographs are shown for the first time in this exhibition, such as that produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s at Piatã Beach in Salvador. For many years, Firmo photographed in one of the principal resorts used by the Black population of the Bahian capital in the 6 x 6 cm format, capturing scenes of the daily enjoyment of that space by Black families, couples, young people and children, all of them making full use of a public space apparently devoid of the elements and signs that characterize structural racism in Brazil. Viewed together, the images appear to function in a reality that is unreal. While they are certainly documentary and direct, they also build a narrative that has an air of the surreal, by confronting the naturalized and hegemonic look that constructs and sustains the prevailing narratives of Brazil’s racial and social structure, which systematically exclude and render invisible the possibility of scenes such as those revealed by Firmo in Piatã.
With a poetic that is his own, Walter Firmo’s photography builds, in its multiple strands, the syntaxes and syntheses of messages capable of penetrating social and cultural structures, transforming them.