On Location: The periphery of São Paulo in photos

A photography collective from the low-income outskirts of São Paulo is the focus of our first On Location column, celebrating Brazil's stunning locations and creative cultures.

Breezeblock suburbs

Unlike in North American or some European cities, where the outskirts of a city are often associated with comfortable, middle-class ideals, the suburbs of São Paulo tend to be the poorest, distant from employment and involving hours-long commutes to commercial districts. The reality for most residents of the periphery is one of daily struggle, cramped in small houses made from unplastered, unpainted breezeblocks.

The periphery in São Paulo is home to more than 2 million people. Culture there has always been strong – samba, for example, is one of the oldest expressions of periphery culture. But in the last two decades, talent from emerging creative scenes in the periphery has burst into the mainstream; musicians like Emicida and Criolo, and muralist Eduardo Kobra have become international names. In 2019, one of Netflix’s biggest hits in Brazil was Sintonia, a series about teenagers in a São Paulo favela, which has been commissioned for a second series. Three months ago, Netflix launched the documentary film AmarElo, mixing Emicida’s music with a moving history lesson on Black culture in Brazil.

For Cícero, the periphery is his home and the focus of a photography collective that he is a founding member of – DiCampana. The collective wants to break down negative stereotypes by publishing powerful photos of daily life all over the São Paulo periferia, north, east, south and west. Some of the images are in this month’s Festival of Images from the Periphery, printed as posters and pasted on to walls, bridges and underpasses around the city as lambe-lambes – a very Brazilian, political form of expression.

“This festival opens a window for incredible photographers from the periferia to talk about their work, where they’re from and what they think,” says Cícero. “It shows that photography doesn’t need to be elitist.” Cícero explains that a number of photo collectives emerged in São Paulo in 2013 – SelvaSP and Manana to name just two – in response to a wave of protests that were sweeping across Brazil.

“We saw these collectives photographing the city but we felt that the periphery was missing from this visual language. It wasn’t represented by the people creating this coverage.” In response, DiCampana was founded in 2016, one of the first collectives to focus on representing the periphery. “For a long time in photography, we’ve been praising the same people, really important people for Brazilian photography without a doubt, but there is a lot of new talent emerging, people with different perspectives and different techniques.” 

Photography is just one form of creative expression gaining recognition as part of “periphery culture”. Saraus (open gatherings that celebrate varied artistic expressions) have become a regular event in some parts of the periphery (pre-pandemic) since the turn of the millennium, with young and old listening to poetry in bars on the weekend. There are now literary festivals and theatre festivals, too.

“There are so many places in the periphery where we see that the culture is really pulsating,” says Cícero. “In the 90s, we had to go to the city centre to have access to culture. Now we don’t need to leave the periphery. And it’s not just that it’s closer to us. We, the residents of the periphery, are creating it. It reflects our daily life, too. When you go to a gig or listen to poetry in a bar, it’s people talking about racism and about really important social issues. These cultural spaces spark debate, and they connect these issues to the visual medium.”

Questions of race and racism are still at the forefront in a city where people of colour represent the majority of the population from the periferia and yet remain a minority across certain sectors, including the media, for example, as is highlighted by research from Énois – a journalism school for youngsters from the periferia.

By way of comparison, people of colour comprise 60.1 per cent of the population of Jardim Angela, in the south-west periphery of the city, whereas people of colour are just 5.8 per cent of the population in the wealthier, more central district of Moema, according to data from the Map of Inequality, which is published by Rede Nossa São Paulo network. “The higher the percentage of people of colour, the lower the average family income of the neighborhood” is how an article in Brazilian newspaper O Globo puts it.

The periphery of São Paulo is comprised of 42 districts – 1,086 km2 of the city’s total of 1,528 km2. The total population of these districts is 7 million people of which 2 million live in what is termed periferia, according to socioeconomic  indicators such as low income, low education, poor healthcare and poor quality housing.

The pandemic has hit communities in the periphery especially hard over the last year, and young creatives are sharing their take on it not just through photographs, but also video. The DiCampana collective recently produced this documentary about homeless people in São Paulo during the pandemic, for which they spent 2 months filming in an occupation.

Zalika Produções is an independent production company from the periphery focusing on Black visibility. Their most recent production, in 2020, was this documentary called System Pandemic: the portrait of inequality in Brazil’s richest capital.

Audiovisual collectives are also emerging in the periphery. Coletivo Nossa Tela, Coletivo Mundo em Foco, Gleba do Pêssego and Coletivo Favela Atitude have produced a mix of documentary and fiction set in the periphery. Alternative streaming services are launching, such as Coletivo Transformar and "daQbrada" – an open, online community where users can upload their own short films and documentaries, giving visibility to independent productions from the periphery.