FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE
Photographer went back to Rio to save a boy’s life; what happened next was a lot more complicated
Five months after LOS ANGELES the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Gordon Parks, a photographer for Life magazine, found himself on a plane to Rio de Janeiro. As he cruised along at 30,000 feet, a thought presented itself: I am about to save a boy’s life.
His name was Flavio da Silva, and he lived in a favela called Catacumba on the steep hillsides of Rio.
Though neither he nor Parks could have foreseen it, Flavio was about to become a pawn in a battle between two media titans: one in the United States, the other in Brazil. Both publications were trying to influence public opinion at a time when the ideological and geopolitical stakes felt frighteningly high.
Parks originally journeyed to Brazil for a Life magazine assignment on March 20, 1961, just as Kennedy was proposing a foreign aid program aimed at improving co-operation between Latin America and the United States. Life’s circulation at the time was around seven million copies and its Republican-leaning editors weren’t shy about using that influence.
It was the height of the Cold War. Fidel Castro’s grip on Cuba had tightened after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Latin America looked vulnerable to communist takeover. Life decided to launch a five-part series titled Crisis in Latin America. Parks, the first African-american to work as a staff photographer at the magazine, was assigned to the second part.
Brazil, like the United States, had a new president, Janio Quadros. Quadros inherited an economy in crisis. He implemented an austerity program, of which the United States approved. But when the United States offered $300 million in foreign aid in return for co-operating with U.S. opposition to Castro’s Cuba, Quadros rejected it. The offer, he felt, was tantamount to a bribe.
Life editors liked to script photo assignments in advance. Parks was told to go to the Rio favelas, “find an impoverished father with a family of eight to 10 children. Show how he earns a living . ... Explore his political leanings. Is he a Communist, or about to become one?”
They wanted Parks to round out the family shots with images providing some social context: ideally, a political rally.
Parks had been uneasy about the assignment from the beginning. But an ally at Life urged him to accept, saying: “Rio de Janeiro is a long, long way from Rockefeller Plaza. Who knows, you might just misinterpret your instructions?”
The first thing was to find a suitable family. Parks went to the favelas on a hot day in March 1961. He was accompanied by Jose Gallo, who managed the local bureau of Time Inc., Life’s owner. As they climbed up a “tangled maze of shacks,” Parks saw Flavio, who was carrying a 40-pound tin of water on his head and who — he would soon discover — suffered from severe asthma.
“He was horribly thin,” Parks wrote, “naked but for his ragged pants. His legs looked like sticks covered with skin and screwed into two dirty feet. He stopped for breath, coughing, his chest heaving as the water slopped over his shoulder and distended belly.”
Parks had his subject. He met Flavio’s seven siblings in their home, and, that evening, his parents. Flavio’s mother, Nair, worked as a washerwoman. She was 35, and pregnant with their ninth child. His father, Jose Manuel, was 42. He had a kiosk selling kerosene and detergent.
Parks had travelled widely but never had he seen such destitution. He and Gallo explained themselves and asked for permission to carry out their assignment. “You can photograph us,” Jose replied, “but you must show us in a good light.”
Parks finished his assignment, largely ignoring the instruction to focus on the father and his political leanings. Instead, he focused on Flavio and his siblings.
Each night he left the favela and returned, uneasy, to his room in Copacabana’s upscale Hotel Excelsior. Parks had grown up the youngest of 15 children and the victim of racist bullying. Now a parent himself, he couldn’t help but empathize with Flavio. He wrote of being “filled with confusion and guilt during my final days in Catacumba. Flavio, like thousands of other children, would die . ... I could not help compare the good fortune of my own children with the fate of these others.”
Three weeks after he arrived, Parks flew back to New York. “I said goodbye to Flavio and the family today,” he wrote. “‘Gorduun, when do you come back?’ (Flavio) asked. ‘Oh someday soon,’ I lied.” But it wasn’t a lie.
Parks’ photos appeared in the June 16, 1961, issue of Life under the heading, Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty.
Parks said he wanted his work “to draw people’s attention to the problems they show” and to play a role in effecting change. An admirer of President Kennedy, he hoped that the new president’s youth and progressive policies would have positive results. But he had seen firsthand, too, that the U.S. lacked credibility in Latin America. If it wanted to solve problems there, he realized, the United States needed first to “clean up its own yard.”
Parks’ photo essay provoked an enormous response from readers, who sent thousands of letters and unsolicited donations. When Life published excerpts from the letters in a subsequent issue, it included an appeal for more donations, which Life said it would use to move the da Silvas to a modest new home and to seek medical treatment for Flavio.
Parks flew back to Rio on June 28. To his relief, Flavio’s parents needed no persuading to release Flavio to the care of a hospital in Denver. “Keep him in hospital as long as necessary but please bring him back cured and well,” his father said.
A team of people worked on getting Flavio a visa and on finding a suitable home for his family.
The day came for the family to move out of Catacumba and a crowd gathered to watch. Parks, who was there to document the day, remembered a woman grabbing his shoulder and saying: “What about us? All the rest of us stay here to die!”
That same night, Parks and Gallo drove Flavio to the airport, and all three flew to America.
In Denver, Flavio was treated at the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital. Life photographer Carl Iwasaki documented the first days in Denver, including visits to the hospital, first days at school and a visit to an amusement park. The photographs of Flavio 2.0 were published in the magazine’s July 21 issue.
The repercussions of this intervention went beyond Flavio and his family. Editors at O Cruzeiro, an illustrated weekly in Brazil, took umbrage at Parks’ photo essay. O Cruzeiro had Brazilian nationalist leanings. Its editors objected to a high-circulation U.S. magazine with an explicit political agenda coming to Brazil to point out problems that had not been solved in its own country.
Their response was charged with chutzpah. They sent a photographer of their own, Henri Ballot, to New York City. After photographing impoverished communities in Spanish Harlem and on the Lower East Side, Ballot homed in on Puerto Rican immigrants Felix and Esther Gonzalez. They lived with their six children in a ratand cockroach-infested tenement building on Rivington Street.
Ballot’s photographs were published in the Oct. 7, 1961, issue of O Cruzeiro. They revealed living conditions every bit as desperate as those of the da Silvas. O Cruzeiro rammed home its point by publishing some of Ballot’s New York images with insets showing Park’s original Rio images.
The two magazines went to war, each accusing the other of staging its photographs. And, as happens in any polarized media environment, real people enduring real predicaments were reduced to pawns in a propaganda war.
Meanwhile, in Denver, Flavio learned English and spent weekends with a Portuguese-speaking family, the Goncalves. Over time, he had less and less contact with his family back in Rio. And when the treatment neared its conclusion after two full years, he begged the Goncalves to adopt him. Instead, in July 1963, Flavio returned to Rio, where he was sent to a boarding school in Sao Paulo — arranged and paid for by Life.
Parks maintained contact with Flavio and in 1978, he published a book about the experience, which brought him back to Rio to gather material. Parks also visited in 1999 to film a documentary. In each of those trips, the journalist saw that his subject’s struggles with poverty had never really abated.
“As a photojournalist,” Parks wrote, “I have occasionally done stories that have seriously altered human lives. In hindsight, I often wonder if it might not have been wiser to have left those lives untouched, to have let them grind out their time as fate intended.”
Flavio himself, now retired from his job as a security guard, later reflected on the fact that, thanks to Parks, “people know more about my life than I do. I’m glad that I’m alive as a result . ... (But) this story never made me feel either better or worse than anyone else.”