From the Favela to the Slum

This article revisits the polemical 1961 confrontation between Life and O Cruzeiro magazines, which revolved around photo essays by North American photographer Gordon Parks of a Rio de Janeiro favela and by French Brazilian photographer Henri Ballot of a New York City slum. Largely interpreted by scholars as a Cold War confrontation over the role of US intervention in Latin American economies and urban development projects, the dispute also hinged on a key set of concerns about the nature of photographic realism and the representation of race. Both Parks and Ballot exchanged accusations of staging and fabrication, a conflict that I argue unsettled conventional associations of race with skin color, on one hand, and urban space, on the other. Developing close visual and spatial interpretations of a photographic archive often glossed over as “ideological,” I show how Parks and Ballot worked within and against the grain of two magazines that served as arbiters of a mid-twentieth-century mass media aesthetic indebted to both documentary realism and consumer capitalist ideals of whiteness. In doing so, I reveal the polemic as a key moment of mutual exchange between Brazil and the United States, challenging dominant readings of the relative fluidity or fixedness of each country’s respective racial system.