When Gordon Parks traveled to Rio de Janeiro in 1961 for Life magazine, he stepped into a country whose struggles around race, poverty, and political power echoed those he had documented in the United States. Brazil and the U.S. share intertwined histories of slavery and discrimination, legacies that continue to reverberate across their social and political landscapes. That parallel is not the reason Parks went to Brazil, but it provides a context for why the story he found there resonated so powerfully, then and now.

Parks had been assigned to photograph an impoverished laborer and to capture the conditions shaping everyday life in Rio’s favelas. But soon after arriving, he encountered twelve-year-old Flávio da Silva in the Catacumba favela, a dense community built on the hillside surrounding Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, a lagoon in the affluent southern part of the city. As with many of his subjects, Parks recognized something of himself in the boy, a kinship shaped by hardship. In his daily life, Flávio bore responsibilities far beyond his years—cooking, cleaning, and caring for his younger siblings while struggling with chronic asthma. The photographs Parks captured, made over days spent with the family in their cramped hillside home, revealed both the harsh realities of poverty and the quiet resilience that defined Flávio’s daily life. When the resulting essay, “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” was published in Life on June 16, 1961, it drew an unprecedented public response, leading to a campaign that brought Flávio to the United States for medical treatment and schooling before he ultimately returned to Brazil.

In 2017, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Ryerson Image Centre, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Instituto Moreira Salles collaborated on Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story, an exhibition and publication about this influential project. In his essay, “Saving Flávio: A Photographic Essay in Context,” curator Paul Roth explained the lasting significance of the Flávio story:

In Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story Burgi elaborates on the lasting impact of such stories:

In the information society of today, photographic images have increasing relevance, particularly given new electronic means for dissemination of visual narratives such as social networks and digital corporate journalism. Yet they still contend with many of the same issues associated with this historic confrontation between Life and O Cruzeiro, wherein questions of authorship, documentation, editing, ethics, staging, and political and ideological sensationalism shroud the images with multiple layers of possible meaning and interpretation. It is interesting to note how—within what was effectively a common experience of poverty shared by individuals living in different hemispheres, so thoroughly documented in the photographs of both reports—public discussion centered on the question of manipulation and reduced confidence in the objectivity of the medium. This episode allows us to better understand the permanent and dual function of photography as representation and interpretation, and, simultaneously, as a direct, documentary, and figurative record of a given moment in space-time, using an apparatus that effectively informs the viewer of the materiality

Over six decades later, these ideas return in the exhibition Gordon Parks: America is Me (Gordon Parks: A América sou eu) at the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, Brazil. The exhibition reminds us that despite different national histories, Brazil and the United States continue to wrestle with shared legacies of racial inequality. Reflecting later on his work, Parks said, “Life sent me on these stories because they knew that I would get involved.” His photographs still call for that involvement, insisting that we consider who comes into view, who does not, and what it means when visibility becomes a force for change.