Images of a profound Brazil that I miss so much

A feeling that has been on me for the last months: ‘feeling of a profound Brazil’.

These are images of people, customs of life (personal and collective), beautiful untouched rural landscapes or small-scale farming, all very authentic, where men and women work hard day by day and live a simple life far from the sophistication of famous urban and industrial centers. Not surprisingly, they are first and foremost very happy.

It was this feeling that motivated me to reread two classics of national and world literature: (1) ‘Grande Sertão: Veredas‘ by João Guimarães Rosa and (2) ‘Os Sertões‘ by Euclides da Cunha. These books describe characters from ‘a Brazil’ that practically only exists in quite remote regions: they are the ‘sertanejos‘. People of great strength and a life suffered but original and happy.

And, ‘a profound Brazil’ what does it mean to me? It means a Brazil ‘from the old days, from many years or several decades past’. A Brazil from the time of my parents, my grandparents.

Not necessarily, it means a country from far inland, difficult to access, to reach. You are often in a big city – say the city of São Paulo – and sometimes you will find ‘images of that profound Brazil’ on Paulista Avenue. For sure, this is the busiest and most important avenue in Brazil and one of the largest and busiest avenues in the big cities of Latin America. Usually it is images of people (portraits) or any of their behaviors that lead me to ‘that Brazil’. Surely these people came from ‘that profound Brazil’ and despite living in big cities beautifully still keeps these behaviors alive, their ways of dressing, talking and facing life.

All this moves me to my childhood, adoslescent times. Then I miss ‘that Brazil’ very much. It is this feeling that strongly motivates me to love photography and to continue photographing until the last of my days here in the face in this world.