I’ve been taking a bit of an interest in favela tourism recently. It was an idea that turned my stomach for a long time, but I’m beginning to see that it might have more dimensions that just being straight-up “exploitative”.
Anyway, I came across this post by a guy called Nat Friedman, who decided to take a tour in Rocinha despite his own reservations. Long story short, the next day he went back with a stack of disposable cameras and handed them out to a bunch of kids. The results are illuminating.
“After I got back and started telling this story to people, I read a newspaper article about some Kodak marketing team that hands cameras out to starving kids in Kenya and posts their photos on kodak.com somewhere, and it made me sick. So I don’t know if my project will disgust you. We did our best to explain the project to everyone who got a camera, some people declined, and everyone who got prints was thrilled to have them.”
The project has generated a fair amount of debate on his blog, and rightly so, but for me it’s interesting (not to mention rare) to see some totally mundane images of Rocinha minus the usual, slightly schizophrenic layer of post-City of God glamorization/condescension. A lot of the photos are awesome, too.
See the whole project here.
