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In 1961, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to document conditions there for a series on poverty in Latin America. He set about photographing the working-class neighborhoods known as favelas, which were home to more than 700,000 people. In one such community, called Catacumba (Catacomb), death seemed to close in from all sides. The place was wrecked by malnutrition and disease; open sewers ran between meager shacks. Having grown up impoverished in Kansas, Parks was shocked by what he saw. “Pockets of poverty in New York’s Harlem, on Chicago’s south side, in Puerto Rico’s infamous El Fungito seemed pale by comparison,” he later recalled. “None of them had prepared me for . . . the favela of Catacumba.”

Parks focused his attention on an industrious but ailing twelve-year-old, Flávio da Silva. Over several weeks he empathetically profiled the da Silva family, their tiny shanty, and the boy’s daily activities, which were often interrupted by debilitating asthma attacks; Parks would learn that Flávio was not expected to live more than another year. After a moving good-bye, Parks returned to New York and presented his story to the editors at Life.

Parks’ photo essay, titled “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” was published across twelve pages in Life in June 1961, and it set off a chain of extraordinary events. The story elicited thousands of letters in praise of Parks and nearly $30,000 in donations from Life readers to help the family and the favela. The magazine embarked on a “rescue” effort that involved relocating the family to a new home, moving Flávio to a hospital in the United States, and administering funds to support rehabilitation of the favela. The story, as well as Parks’ and Life’s relationship to Flávio, continued to develop over many years. The details of this history provide a fascinating look at the impact of one of Parks’ most celebrated photo essays, at the context of its publication amid Cold War politics in the United States and Brazil, and at the inner workings and cultural force of the “Great American Magazine.”

Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story is a selection of photographs from the exhibition of the same title that was made in collaboration with and on view at Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California.

Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961

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Flavio da Silva, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961

Catacumba: 1961

In March 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed the Alliance for Progress, a foreign aid program designed to improve economic cooperation between the United States and Latin America. Less than three months later, Life magazine launched a five-part series titled “Crisis in Latin America.” It was published biweekly, with the explicit aims of supporting formation and funding of the Alliance and warning against the spread of communism in the region. For the second article in the series, Life sent Gordon Parks to Rio de Janeiro with a specific assignment: to photograph the life and work of an impoverished father of eight to ten children and learn of his political leanings.

Once in Brazil, however, Parks sidestepped these terms. While climbing the hills to the Catacumba favela, behind the glamorous Rio shoreline that tourists knew, Parks and José Gallo, his Life contact, stopped to rest beneath a jacaranda tree. There they spotted a wan, emaciated boy carrying a tin of water on his head. He stopped momentarily, keeling over with a violent cough, and then, meeting Parks’ gaze, flashed a broad and completely unexpected smile. To Parks, this boy, Flávio da Silva, embodied the brutality of poverty—and he decided to shift the focus of his story. Flávio invited Parks and Gallo into his family’s tiny home: four walls of salvaged wood beneath a rusted tin roof, where the daily battle for life was punctuated by affection, humor, and savagery. The eldest of eight children, Flávio introduced the rest of his family: father José (a kerosene salesman), mother Nair (pregnant with another child), sisters Maria da Penha, Luzia (the pretty one), Isabel, and Abia, and brothers Mário (the bad one), João Batista, and baby Zacarias.

Parks’ photographs show Flávio cooking, cleaning, scavenging for supplies, and minding his siblings, despite his suffering from bronchial asthma and malnutrition, while his parents work outside the home. The photographer later recalled the da Silva home as being in a constant state of chaos and wondered “how, in such a weak condition, [Flávio] could face this each day—the fighting, the whimpering, and the filth.”

Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961. Photograph by Paulo Muniz.

The “Rescue”: 1961–1963

Parks felt an emotional connection to the boy and his suffering, and urged Life’s editors to publish an extensive photographic essay that effectively conveyed the tragedy of the da Silvas’ poverty. Managing editor Edward K. Thompson initially steered the story in a different direction, including only a sample of Parks’ reportage among photographs by others in an early layout. But Life reconsidered, and published the Flávio story, “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” across twelve pages in its June 16, 1961, issue.

The publication of Parks’ photo essay prompted an overwhelming response from readers of Life, causing the editors to publish a special report on July 7, “A Great Urge to Help Flavio.” The magazine sent Parks back to Brazil to spearhead this “rescue” mission alongside a Time Inc. staffer, José Gallo. Together they relocated the da Silva family into a new home purchased thanks to reader funds. With his parents’ permission, Parks and Gallo accompanied Flávio to the United States for medical treatment at the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital (CARIH) in Denver. The photographs of Gordon and Flávio together reveal the degree to which Parks held himself personally responsible for the well-being of the boy (and anticipate the tender but troubled connection they would maintain through letters and visits for the rest of Parks’ life).

Life documented the events for the follow-up article in the July 21 issue, “The Compassion of Americans Brings a New Life for Flavio.” While his transition proved difficult, Flávio learned quickly in school and adapted to U.S. culture while living with a local Portuguese-speaking family, the Gonçalveses. Over time, he grew used to his new circumstances. He became desperate to remain in the United States and pleaded with Parks and the Gonçalves family to adopt him. In July 1963, two years after leaving Brazil, Flávio returned to Rio de Janeiro.

Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1976

Ongoing Friendship: 1976, 1999

In 1976, Parks flew to Rio once again to photograph and interview Flávio, in preparation for a book he was writing about their experience. Flávio, now twenty-seven, welcomed Parks, José Gallo, and Parks’ assistant, photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy, to the home he shared with his wife, Cleuza, and his two sons, Flávio Jr. and Felipe Luiz. Recounting his life in Brazil, Flávio described his work history and current job as night watchman. Reluctantly, he took Parks and Gallo to visit the rest of his family, still living in the house that Life and its readers had bought in Rio’s Guadalupe district. Flávio was deeply embarrassed by the condition of the house and by his family’s return to poverty. Before Parks left Brazil, he visited Catacumba with Flávio and Gallo; the favela was now a lush hillside, after the area had been demolished by the state government in 1970. When parting ways, Flávio asked Parks to help him return to the United States.

In 1999, Gordon Parks traveled to Brazil yet again, thirty-eight years after his original photo essay and twenty-three after his previous visit with Flávio. Accompanied by his assistant, Johanna Fiore, and a film crew making a documentary about his life, Parks found Flávio, now fifty years old, living in a shed behind the house that Life had purchased in 1961. Since Parks’ visit in 1976, Flávio and Cleuza had had a third child, a daughter, but in 1990 they separated. Four years after that Flávio lost his job, and since then he had survived on occasional construction work. Together Parks and Flávio went to a favela in Rio and compared it with the long-destroyed muddy hillside of Catacumba. As Parks departed Rio, Flávio reassured him that while his life had been difficult, he would continue to work hard, and would rebuild his family’s now dilapidated home and then build himself a new house. It was the last time they would see each other. Parks died seven years later, in 2006.