How remarkable that eleven photos of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro by Gordon Parks in the June 16, 1961 edition of Life magazine could produce this fascinating 304 page book. Some of the photos are now well known and originally appeared in the second part of a Life six-part series on Latin America. The book has a first-class forty-four page illustrated essay by Paul Roth, revealing the background to Parks photo assignment. It was connected with President Kennedy's Alliance for progress plan for democracy in the Americas which Life's owner Henry Luce fully supported and suggested the magazine (and its Spanish edition) could help promote.
To the surprise of the magazine's editors the photo essay of the da Silva family and in particular their twelve year old son Flavio impressed a huge number of readers (the magazine was selling almost seven million copies weekly) with letters and money pouring into Life's offices, by the late summer of 1961 more than $24,000 had been donated and there was an offer from a children's hospital in Denver to take Flavio and cure his asthma. This created another assignment for Parks to photograph him in the hospital and living in America, the July 21, 1961 issue had a smiling Flavio on the cover and thirteen photos inside, including three of the da Silva's moving into a new home in Rio paid for by Life's readers.
Not everyone in Brazil was pleased with a well known American magazine doing a photo essay about the favelas of Rio. O Cruzeiro, a Brazilian popular illustrated weekly sent their staff photographer, Henri Ballot, to Harlem to capture the slums of New York. The book reproduces fourteen pages from the October 7, 1961 issue with Harlem photos and just to make sure their readers got the point Parks original comparable photos are inset into them. Another six pages are reproduced from a November 18, 1961 issue discussing Parks da Silva family photos.
There are 112 plates in the book, divided into five sections, showing the da Silva family and Flavio through the years from 1961 to 1999, all photographed by Parks and Henri Ballot's photos of the family and Harlem during 1961. Besides the long Roth essay there are three others, all illustrated and an interview with Flavio from December 2016. The book's production is immaculate as you would expect from Steidl. A minor criticism though, the images in the illustrated essays all have captions near them but the plates don't, all those captions are in four pages at the back of the book, expect a lot of page flipping.
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