This photo essay appeared in the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro, in 1961.
Four months after the American magazine, Life, published this one.
The layouts are nearly identical.
Even the photos look similar.
When you look closer, you see why:
The Brazilian magazine recreated the American spreads, page for page.
This is a story about photos used as propaganda,
and then retaliation.
For decades, Life magazine was the leading general interest weekly in the US.
In 1961, they announced a new mission: helping to win the Cold War.
Which had entered the western hemisphere two years earlier,
when Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro took control of Cuba.
Quickly turning Central and South America into a battleground over economic influence
between the capitalist US and communist Soviet Union.
After the CIA’s numerous failed attempts to assassinate Castro,
followed by a bungled invasion of Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, the US switched strategies.
And in 1961, US President John F. Kennedy introduced a new plan to stop communism spread:
the “Alliance for Progress”
A financial aid program to support Latin American countries –
ARCHIVE: To assist in casting off the chains of poverty
– if they rejected Castroism.
This initiative is where Life magazine comes into play.
Thanks to their editor-in-chief, Henry Luce.
PAUL ROTH: Henry Luce was very closely connected to the halls of power in Washington DC.
He felt very strongly that the magazine could play a role in spreading propaganda against communism.
To fulfill this mission, Life sent one of its star photographers, Gordon Parks, to Rio de Janeiro.
With instructions to photograph a father caring for multiple children while living in poverty.
ROTH: They wanted to demonstrate that a certain kind of man was susceptible to communism.
Parks had a reputation for producing expressive photos that explored racism and inequality in the United States.
And in Brazil, instead of focusing on a father, Parks photographed a young boy: Flavio.
And his daily life caring for his siblings in Catacumba, one of Rio’s favelas.
The informal housing communities built in Brazilian cities and usually neglected by the government.
Paul Roth co-curated an exhibit about Flavio’s story at the Ryerson Image Center in Toronto.
And, before that, co-edited a five-volume survey of Parks’ photos.
ROTH: Gordon Parks ended up making a story that is much more about the life and the suffering and the personality of a single child
than it was a story about communism in South America, which is what his editors wanted him to do.
But those editors were ultimately in charge of the magazine’s final layout.
They arranged Parks’ stark black and white images across 10 pages for this photo essay, titled “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty.”
Which also published in Life en Español, the Spanish-language version of the magazine distributed across Latin America.
Life advised the reader that the poverty of this one family — the Da Silvas — “can be found almost anywhere in Latin America.”
And, without explaining why, that “the teeming poor are a ripe field for Castroist and Communist political exploitation.”
Which creates an urgency for “Kennedy’s new ‘alliance for progress’ program to gain support.
The way the photos were laid out demonstrated that urgency.
First, a two-page spread showed a crying child next to her exhausted, sleeping father.
Then three vertical photos establish the scene of the favela:
a boy crying, supposedly after being bitten by a dog,
the sprawl of the favela in view of Rio’s famous statue of Jesus Christ,
and Flavio’s baby brother, Zacarias, wandering alone.
The next two-page spread introduced Flavio.
The caption says “the family’s day begins at dawn.”
Next, three action photos of Flavio caring for his family.
The text, titled “A Boy Burdened with a Family’s Cares,”
revealed that Flavio suffers from asthma and malnutrition, and may soon die.
Which set up the powerful final 2 pages:
two side-by-side photos, one depicting a bed-ridden Flavio recovering from an asthma attack,
and, opposite, his dead neighbor on a funeral bier, wrapped in a shroud.
The caption on this last photo included a quote from Flavio:
“I am not afraid of death. But what will they do after?”
ROTH: Well, the response to the story was extraordinary.
First hundreds and then thousands of people started to write in.
Life readers, moved by the photos of Flavio, sent the magazine tens of thousands in donations to “save” him and his family.
And the leading pediatric asthma hospital in the US offered to treat Flavio – free of charge.
Life printed photos of a happy Flavio enjoying a new life in Denver,
and medical care from a team of American doctors.
The cover for this issue showed a smiling Flavio in full color, captioned “Flavio’s rescue.”
The story seemed to demonstrate – on a small scale at least –
how Americans could successfully intervene in other countries and change things for the better.
But in Brazil, the response was drastically different.
SÉRGIO BURGI: Rio had just lost its status as capital of the country to Brasilia.
The city was going through an intense moment in reshaping its future,
and the issues, of course, of inequality in Brazil, were always there.
The photo reportage by such an important photographer as Parks in such an international magazine was very significant.
Brazilian media, in particular, criticized Life for choosing to present such a narrow, negative view of the city.
Like in this cartoon in the illustrated Brazilian weekly news magazine, Manchete.
Which showed a model photographed against a propped up background of a slum.
The caption read:
One Brazilian magazine in particular wanted to strike back.
BURGI: O Cruzeiro magazine was the most important illustrated magazine in Brazil during the 40s, into the early 60s.
Like Life, O Cruzeiro was a general interest weekly magazine that put a huge emphasis on photography.
And captured the daily life, landscapes, and people of modern Brazil.
In response to Gordon Parks’ photo essay, the magazine sent a photographer of their own, Henri Ballot, to New York.
To report on American poverty.
BURGI: Cruzeiro said “Okay, you also have a similar situation in your country and you are using a magazine
that has an international audience to pinpoint into Brazil, into Rio...so we are going to do the same.”
Ballot met and photographed a family of Puerto Rican immigrants, the Gonzalez family, who lived in a poor area of Manhattan.
O Cruzeiro published the photos in an essay, called “New American Record: Misery.”
They wrote that Parks’ photos from Rio made it seem “as if misery were exclusively ours. It is not.”
To demonstrate that point, O Cruzeiro recreated the Life photo essay, image for image.
And even included the Life pages Ballot’s photos were referencing.
Here’s the layout for both, page by page:
First, a two-page spread showing a father and child.
Then, three vertical photos showing a crying child, a bleak urban landscape and a wandering baby.
Then, another two page spread of the family in bed.
Then, three photos of children caring for themselves.
And finally, two full page photos end the essay with a malnourished boy.
Ballot’s final dramatic photo showed a sleeping Ely-Samuel Gonzalez covered in cockroaches.
The caption seemed to mock Life bringing Flavio to the US, saying of Ely-Samuel,
Over the next few weeks, accusations of staged photos from media in both countries flew back and forth.
Life’s sister magazine, Time, claimed that Ballot arranged the cockroaches himself in his “most moving photo.”
In response, O Cruzeiro sent Ballot to the favela to prove that Parks’s photo of Flavio waking up at dawn was actually taken at noon.
But whether or not aspects of these photos were staged, this dispute between two national magazines wasn’t really about the subjects they profiled.
It was about sensationalism, and propaganda, and selling magazines.
BURGI: The whole thing here became something that was devoted not to journalism,
not to poverty and the causes of poverty both in the U.S. and in Latin America.
This dispute is really a market dispute for hearts and minds going on in the whole continent.
American intervention in Latin America during the Cold War didn’t work out the way Kennedy had hoped.
The Alliance for Progress was eventually approved by Congress and the US sent billions of dollars to Latin American countries in the 1960s.
But it failed to improve living conditions in Latin America or bolster US influence in the region
And by the early 1970s, it was considered a failure.
Like the two photo essays, the initiative was more about politics than it was about addressing the root causes of poverty.
Hey everyone, thanks for watching the first episode of Darkroom Season 3. We’ll be publishing more videos over the next few months, so keep an eye out for that.
I also wanted to share something that surprised us when researching this episode.
Like Life, O Cruzeiro also published a Spanish-language edition of the magazine
that was distributed throughout Latin America, O Cruzeiro Internacional.
That’s not the surprising part.
It’s the way they presented Ballot’s photos from New York.
This version, which came out 3 months after the original, didn’t call out Life by name or include Gordon Parks’ photos.
But it did hint at the dispute, writing that, “the report is neither a response or an attack.”
It’s a “a warning – to those who insist on showing what is negative about us, instead of highlighting our virtues.