Gordon Parks: The Flavio Story
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, through Nov. 10
In the late spring of 1961, a photo essay in Life magazine “landed like a lightning bolt,” said Carolina Miranda in the Los Angeles Times. Renowned photographer Gordon Parks had traveled to Rio de Janeiro to document poverty in Latin America, and his images of 12-year-old Flavio da Silva made the rail-thin favela resident an instant icon. The oldest of eight children in a family packed into a hillside shack, Flavio was shown hauling water, feeding beans to an infant sibling, and enduring a fierce asthmatic attack. And he was quoted saying he didn’t fear death, only how his family could survive without him. Donations poured into Life, enabling the magazine to buy the family a house and shuttle Flavio to the U.S. for medical treatment. The feature also triggered dueling series of photographs, which are now part of the Getty Museum’s current exhibition.
Context matters here, said Murray Whyte in the Toronto Star. In truth, the Life feature “was as much Cold War propaganda play as it was altruistic journalistic endeavor.” The hugely popular magazine wished to drum up support for President Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress,” a program ostensibly concerned with thwarting the spread of communism by lifting the economies of Latin America. Parks fulfilled the assignment in his typical humane way, focusing on one bright, gregarious boy, and so “amid the hyperbole of what we’ve cynically come to call ‘poverty porn’ are moments of tenderness and light.” Not everyone in Rio was impressed, said Maurice Berger in NYTimes.com. O Cruzeiro, a weekly magazine, sent its own staffer to New York City to photograph the poverty there, as a way of suggesting that America clean its own house before intervening in Brazil. But Henri Ballot’s images of a family’s squalid roach-infested apartment, though disturbing, “also appeared contrived.”
Parks, to his credit, never abandoned his subject, said Douglas Messerli in Hyperallergic.com. Life asked him to accompany Flavio on his flight to the U.S., and the magazine published an image of the African-American photographer shepherding the frightened boy through Denver’s airport. For two years, Flavio lived happily with an American family eager to adopt him until his father demanded his return. Parks went back to visit Flavio more than once, each time finding him scraping together a meager income and living in the same house purchased by Life. In a “lovely” 1977 portrait, he’s seen descending a steep slope in Rio through a sea of tall weeds. By then he is in his late 20s, and “he is both at home and entrapped in a world still dominated by the outsider visions of Rio.”