Rio de Janeiro’s outskirts, early 1940s. It was late at night on a weekend. Walter Firmo, then 4 years old, sat on the neck of his father, João, whom he called “his black horse.” “Black Horse” and Maria, his mother, were walking down the neighborhood when Firmo was stunned by the waning moonlight that spilled over the prairie. “That was my first-ever photograph,” Firmo said, recalling how the image jolted him.
That 4-year-old boy remains vivid in Firmo, an 86-year-old photographer whose lyrical, unexpected images have changed visual storytelling in Brazil. Firmo developed an unmistakable aesthetic identity, challenged long-established photojournalism norms, and radically shaped coverage of Black Brazil.
At a time when most popular imagery reinforced stereotypes and racism, Firmo documented Black communities, cultures and experiences with beauty, dignity and humanity. For his pioneering work, Firmo, active since the 1950s, has earned industry recognition and run Brazil’s National Institute of Photography. Firmo’s images are now their own canon.
Firmo’s poetic sense is still evident in his work, and his personality. After a teenage kiss “under a beautiful starry sky, I understood that everything I did should go through amorousness,” Firmo said in a translated interview, recalling how he learned to see the world.
Firmo’s father’s job in the navy took the family from Rio’s outskirts, where Firmo lived as a child, across Brazil. Living on northeastern Brazil’s coast, where Firmo could see fishermen sailing on the Atlantic, and in the Pantanal wetlands, fascinated him: “It was like the world belonged to me. I had never felt freedom as I did then,” Firmo said.
A few years later, he discovered impressionism through an art book gifted by his mother. “I felt transformed after seeing that.” It was like a photographic eureka, he said. His portrait of Clementina de Jesus, one of the remarkable voices of Brazilian music, was, in Firmo’s words, “a later development of the impressionism I saw in that book.”
At 15, passionate for what he witnessed but couldn’t yet capture, Firmo got his first Rolleiflex — and, a bit later, his first photojournalist job. “I knocked on the newspaper door and said, ‘If you give me a chance, I’ll be, in six months, better than your best photojournalist,’” Firmo recalled, laughing.
He got the job at the newspaper Última Hora — and he certainly stood out. There, photojournalism conventions were taken as dogmas, leaving little space for experimentation with “truth” and “objectivity.” But Firmo wasn’t afraid to curate the visual elements of his photos (something orthodox photojournalists declined to do) and use colors in a fauvism-inspired manner (then considered by his peers as “bad taste”).
“There are so many ways to inform. … I wanted to create a new way of photographically researching the news,” he wrote in his 2004 book, “Firmo.”
What began with adding fallen foliage to a pothole (his first creative intervention in photojournalism) gradually developed into a style. “I started inserting my visual semantics in those photos. And this is how Walter Firmo, the photographer, was born.”
But the most acclaimed aspect of his work — transforming the visual narrative about Black Brazil — began in his 30s. In 1967, he was temporarily working in New York for a Brazilian magazine. A colleague questioned the firm for having hired a “bad, illiterate and Black” correspondent, he recalled.
While Firmo already had an interest in documenting Brazil’s social inequalities, that episode, he said, “changed the political orientation of my photography.” Coming home from a racially segregated United States, inspired by the Black Panther Party, Gordon Parks’s photography and the “Black is beautiful” movement, Firmo was committed to making Brazil proud of its Black identities.
“I made myself a defender of Blackness in Brazil, and made Black people the totems of my photography,” Firmo said. “After they have been historically vilified, I wanted to extol them, show their happiness, and how wonderful they are.”
Since the late 1960s, Firmo covered a wide array of Black communities, experiences and universes — from a “dreams seller” on a beach in Salvador to Carnival-goers on the train in Rio — and, famously, photographed the legendary composer Pixinguinha under his house’s mango tree (one of the most iconic portraits of Brazilian music history).
Brazilian music made his photography flourish. Music icons like Gilberto Gil, Dona Ivone Lara and Milton Nascimento became “totems” of Firmo’s lens. Some of these portraits became pop references. “When it comes to Brazilian culture, Black people have always been in the first place,” Firmo said.
That work connected Firmo to composer Cartola and singer Clementina, both giants from Rio’s samba scene.
“Can you believe I was friends with these two?” said Firmo, who would often attend samba gatherings at Cartola’s home and recalled Clementina singing on his birthday.
Through a seven-decade career and over 145,000 photos, Firmo has told a different visual story about Brazil, its people and its memory. He is working on an autobiographical book, wants to shoot the roots of Brazilian trees and doesn’t plan on stopping.
“A man like me, who loves his job, will always feel like a happy child,” he said.
