59 retratos da juventude negra brasileira

Brazilian black youth is being exterminated. Recent studies on violence in Brazil, compiled on the Map of Violence, reveal a frightening number: 59 young black people are murdered every day. No, these young Brazilians are not invisible. Edu Simões is a photographer with more than forty years of career, celebrated in the fields of photojournalism and art photography that he decided to show, traveling around the country to portray young people from the outskirts of various cities, such as Belém, Brasília, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and São Paulo, embodying this cruel statistic. It seeks, with this, to give visibility to this intolerable Brazilian reality, the legacy of a policy of social payment, as the researcher, writer and activist Juliana Borges points out, an important voice in the contemporary debate and which presents in "59" an illuminating text about the historical context of violence against blacks in the country. Cristianne Rodrigues, an experienced curator of photography, brazilian based in Paris, where she has held several exhibitions as curator of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), among other French institutions, presents a surprising overview of the representation of the black population in iconography over almost two hundred years, analyzing how the contribution of Edu Simões presents these young black people in another way: flashy, resistant, with identities and subjectivities. "Engraved in the center of the image, standing, full body, silent, they are the ones who look us in the eyes," says Cristianne.