Tell us about your finalist work for the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025. When and where was it created? What is its concept? How does it fit into your photographic practice?
The series “To the Beings of Metamorphosis” was created with the Exus of the Casa de Quimbanda 7 Marias, in the city of Abaeté (MG) in 2022; and it is part of a broader ongoing photo-ethnographic research project with entities, spirits, enchanted beings, and Orishas that I have been conducting for about 12 years, in various regions of Brazil (mainly in Minas Gerais) and also in Mozambique, where I lived and conducted field research on the relationships between witchcraft and politics for my doctorate in anthropology.
By proposing a complement to the famous Spinozian question: “what can a body do… with Exu?” the series addresses themes such as possession, trance, the body; and ultimately the different compositions of people and worlds marked by Black ancestry in contemporary contexts of the diaspora. It also deals with the possibilities of photography as a form of possession. As a medium, the photographs presented here were taken in a state of “semi-trance” in which my entities also manifest to interact with those present in the ritual (gira).
This way of producing images has effects not only on the process of photographing (not being “in control,” or obsessed with technically “perfect” images in the logic of the most common visual language within documentary and journalistic photography) but also in relational terms: to photograph “with,” and not “about”; to create means for the spirits to allow themselves to manifest through the images, in a way analogous to what they do with bodies.
What projects are you currently working on? What are your near-future plans for photographic production?
I like to develop long-term projects. I am currently in the process of producing a photobook from the series “who walks with the old black spirit” (quem anda com nego velho), developed over the last 15 years with the brotherhoods of Reinado and Congado in Minas Gerais. I also continue with the research on Exus and other entities and plan an exhibition of this work for next year.
Both projects start from an “inside” perspective. In Belo Horizonte, I am part of the quilombo and Irmandade de Congo e Moçambique de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e Sagrado Coração de Jesus – Os Carolinos; and also of the Casa de Caridade Pai Jacob do Oriente, one of the oldest Umbanda terreiros in the capital. One of the premises and challenges of this perspective is not only to avoid reproducing the various prejudiced stereotypes (textual and visual) about the involved people and beings; but to assume a perspective contrary to these stereotypes. This implies the incorporation of the various agencies and presences that compose the experiences, both in the recorded rites and practices, and in the very act of photography. As I learned from healers in Mozambique (who treated photography as a counter-sorcery and the camera as a functional equivalent of their work instruments), claiming an animism for images implies assuming, and mainly taking responsibility for, their deeds and effects. It is about moving from a logic of representation – so dear to the West, both in imagistic and political terms – to another, that of re-cognition – that is, knowing in other terms.
