Brazil: Moreira Salles Institute exhibits 260 photographs by Carioca Walter Firmo

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The iconic portraits of composers Pixinguinha and Cartola and singer Clementina de Jesus and beautiful images exalting the culture and the black Brazilian population, all produced by photographer Walter Firmo, are displayed at the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) in São Paulo City. The exhibition has free admission.

The exhibition Walter Firmo: In the Verb of Silence, the Synthesis of the Scream will be shown until September 11 and brings together more than 260 works by the artist from Rio de Janeiro.

The coordinator of Photography at IMS, Sergio Burgi, is the curator of the exhibition, and professor Janaina Damaceno Gomes, from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), the assistant curator. Janaina is the coordinator of the Research Group Afrovisualidades: Aesthetics and Politics of the Black Image.

The selection occupies two floors of the building on Avenida Paulista and presents photographs taken from the 1950s, when Firmo began his career, to those taken last year.

Part of the works come from the photographer’s collection, which has been under the custody of the IMS since 2018 on a loan basis.

Walter Firmo, who photographed for magazines such as Realidade and Manchete and the phonographic industry, is known for experimentation and creating staged and directed images with strong and intense colors, which dialogue with painting and cinema.

“Photography, for me, resides in those magic instants in which I can freely interpret the imponderable, the magical, the enchantment, in which the dazzle can be made through lights, backgrounds, endless subtleties, managing theater and cinema in this game of seduction, a true simultaneous translation built in the blink of an eye in which the intellect and the heart come together, materializing atmospheres,” said Firmo.

The exhibition also includes photographs and the text written for the article 100 Days in No Man’s Amazon, published in Jornal do Brasil in 1964, for which Walter Firmo won the Esso Award for Reporting.

Among the exhibition’s highlights are also an essay made by Firmo with the artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário, made in 1985 for the magazine IstoÉ, and a series of photos of Pixinguinha.

The public visiting the exhibition can also watch the short film Pequena África (“Little Africa” – 2002) by filmmaker Zózimo Bulbul, in which Firmo worked as director of photography.

More information about the exhibition can be obtained at the IMS website.

With information from Agência Brasil