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Retratistas do Morro/Afonso Pimenta

(Brazil, 1954)

Afonso Pimenta is part of a tradition of portrait photographers who live and work in Brazilian favelas and have been producing, over the past fifty years, a very particular iconography of the people in these communities. Since 2015, Pimenta’s work—along with that of his colleague João Mendes—has received the recognition it deserves through the creation of the Retratistas do Morro collective, conceived by researcher and artist Guilherme Cunha.
This initiative has been dedicated to studying and preserving the archives of these photographers from Minas Gerais, which contain over 250,000 items in various formats. In the mid-1980s, Pimenta documented the Bailes Black Soul [Black Soul Parties] in Aglomerado da Serra, the largest favela in Belo Horizonte. In the era of analog photography, when taking pictures was still a privilege for a few, he captured the daily life, struggles, and cultural expressions of the favela, creating an impressive body of work that is both a historical record and an artistic achievement of the highest formal excellence.

Leo Felipe

Bio

Retratistas do Morro/Afonso Pimenta (Brazil, 1954) is a project conceived by artist and researcher Guilherme Cunha. It presents the collection of photographers Afonso Pimenta and João Mendes, who were responsible for taking photographs in the Serra neighborhood of Belo Horizonte. At the Mercosul Biennial, we will exclusively show a series of photos by Afonso Pimenta with images of the Black Soul balls held in Belo Horizonte in the mid-1980s. In the 1960s, Pimenta left São Pedro do Suaçuí (MG) for Belo Horizonte and learned to take photographs in the 1970s, precisely with João Mendes, owner of Foto Mendes, who was his neighbor. Pimenta's career took off in the early 1980s when he began photographing the soul balls organized by Misael Avelino dos Santos, one of the founders of Rádio Favela. Over time, he recorded several balls throughout the city and demonstrations that affirmed the power of black cultural identity in Belo Horizonte. The work of Retratistas do Morro is part of several national and international collections and was recently transformed into a book. Afonso Pimenta lives in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

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