Beautiful and Black – See the work of the Bahian photographer that values black beauty

Note from BW of Brazil: Welcome to 2015! Hoped you’ve recovered from the party and you brought in the new year safely! After a great 2014, we at BW of Brazil are back to business as usual and our first post of 2015 is a great start! The photos presented in today’s post represent everything we discuss and what our objective is here: exposing the darker faces that Brazil’s ultra Eurocentric media prefers to hide, the beauty of Brazil’s black women and highlighting the fact that there is a whole people in Latin America’s largest, most populous country who deserve to represent the image of their country as much as those who classify themselves as white. Today’s photo exhibit follows past projects by other photographers who also chose to focus their attention on black women (see here, here, here and here). Hope you enjoy the photos and keep your eye on the blog in 2015! It’s gonna be a great year!

Beautiful and Black – See the work of the Bahian photographer that values black beauty

Courtesy of Maria Preta

Marcus Socco was born in Salvador, Bahia. Since always his eyes have seen moments between light and human facts that only photography could have supported for the materialization. Even before photography came into his life, he thought of the forms of expression and on this path he went a theater meeting and also discovered stage lighting that enchanted him and he decided to study it, also becoming a professional in the art of lighting.

Photography is a support for images, it is the individual look of each one about the world that materializes. The path of expression in the work ‘Linda e Preta’ (Beautiful and Black) (1) was motivated principally by Marcus’s liking of photographing Black Women, whom he finds beautiful and always caught his attention, the other motivation is his activism in the production of content and images of common black women on the internet, escaping from Renaissance legacies, legacies which are used by the advertising and marketing world.

Shot on the streets in Salvador and Feira de Santana (Bahia), in cultural events circulating in cities, where he captures and catches the everyday, where he meets and hears stories and thoughts of these people on what they are and their attitudes towards their own image and ethnicity. “I realized that one comment was repeated over time, in which women said they were not photogenic and so their photos were not pretty, but what I saw was non-recognition of one’s image due to being far this aesthetic. The first person that has to see herself as beautiful in the pictures is the ‘model’. It’s for her and by her that I do this work,” he emphasizes.

Last year, the photographer participated in four collective exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Feira de Santana (MAC Feira or Contemporary Art Museum of Feira de Santana), and one of them was ‘Linda e Preta’, the others were works produced for releases of collections of poems (Cidades, meaning cities) a free theme on the work Temporalidade (meaning temporality) to erotic and pornographic photography (Eros Illuminado).

And over the lifetime of this work ‘Linda e Preta’ a good of the photos are from 2013 and 2014. It is noteworthy that some pictures are from when he started shooting in 2012, a period in which Marcus didn’t have a direction of conception for this work.

With information from Marcus Socco and text editing by Emerson Azevedo.

See all of the photos on our Tumblr page here, here and here.

Source: Maria Preta

Note

1. It’s worth mentioning here that both the terms negro/negra and preto/preta means black Portuguese. As a general rule within the Movimento Negro, the preto/preta refer to the actual color black while negro/negra is used in reference to persons of African descent and considered part of the black race, or raça negra. Sometimes people will use the terms interchangeably, while others consider the term preto/preta to refer to Afro-Brazilians of very dark brown or black skin tones. In the 1970s, it became fashionable for people to say Negro É Lindo, meaning ‘black is beautiful’. The phrase was also the title of a popular song in 1971 for well-known singer/musician Jorge Ben.