Contested Visualities: Courage and Fear in the Portrayal of Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas

• In Event: Visual Epistemologies and Human Rights

Abstract

Rio de Janeiro is well-known for its hypnotic beauty and vibrant cultural life, but also for the social, spatial and symbolic boundaries that separate the people living in favelas (self-built communities of the urban poor) from the rest of the city. This paper combines ethnographic fieldwork in the form of informal and open-ended interviews with textual analysis to explore the different ways in which mainstream photojournalists and community photographers negotiate courage and fear to obtain a public voice and tell the complexity of life in Rio’s favelas.

Despite increasing death among journalists working in the favelas, mainstream photojournalists value the power of images of armed confrontations and social struggles in encouraging public discussion and advocating for actions to end human right abuses. On the other hand, community photographers, who live in the favelas and face daily threats from rival armed groups, turn to image-making practices as a way of claiming their fundamental right to communicate, so they can actively shape the popular representations of their communities and speak against injustice. I argue that the production of contested visual representations of Rio’s favelas from these sources is a significant contribution to the favela residents’ struggles for human rights.

Author

• Alice Baroni, University of Padova