In 2003, the seven photographers of Viva Favela mounted an impressive exhibition of their first two years of existence. The show was called Por Dentro da Favela or From Inside the Favela. At the time I was teaching a study abroad class on human rights and media in Rio and when I took the students to the museum I remember how astonished they were that there were pictures of joy and happiness, resiliency and dignity. It was the first time, they said, that they saw positive representations of favelas.
From the beginning of the project in 2001, I had been keeping an eye on Viva Favela. Started by a larger NGO, Viva Rio, the Viva Favela online magazine was an attempt to bridge the digital divide between favela communities and the rest of the city. But after seeing their first exhibition, I approached the Viva Favela team and asked if I could follow the photographers more closely. As a photographer myself, I was more interested in the visual aspects of the project in part because the aesthetics of favelas are rarely represented. Researchers also seldom represent those who work in the field of grassroots media production.
So for the next several years, whenever I was in Rio, I began to follow the photographers when they were on assignment. My initial research goals were to study the rise of a visual inclusion project and the process of social change related to participatory media. I also wanted to trace the human rights connections to this kind of photojournalism and to more fully understand the joys, the risks and the possibilities of photographing in the favelas.
Looking back, I feel fortunate to have witnessed Viva Favelas’s early years because, in many ways, they were part of the first wave of new media citizen journalism in Brazil. Twenty years ago, no one was seriously photographing inside the communities yet alone uploading videos from cell phones, which is happening today. This transformation in the past twenty years has been a radical actualization of human rights. By following Viva Favela, I realized that human rights and media is not just a space to denounce violations. Rights can be approached from an affirmative perspective. I also learned that there’s a critical difference between the dissemination of information and the transformation of information. Mainstream media just moves information around from producers to consumers concerning the favelas. As a transformative media arts project, Viva Favela empowered people to produce media, circulate news and receive visual stories that reflected their lives.
On the 10th anniversary of Viva Favela in 2011, we launched a site in the spirit of open source media where the book could be appreciated online and downloaded for free in both the English and Portuguese versions. After the project closed down shortly thereafter for funding reasons, the book became a valuable record of those first 10 years. Today on the 20th anniversary, we realize more than ever that Viva Favela was on the vanguard of the movement of citizen journalism in favela communities. Our intention in launching a new site and the book is recall the story behind participatory media in Brazil. We hope to add more interviews to update this story on what is happening in the communities today and to collectively remember how a larger movement was started.
Peter Lucas teaches courses related to human rights and media at New York University and The New School. He is also a photographer and filmmaker and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his documentary projects in Brazil. His visual work can be seen at peterlucas.net