Six years ago, Rafael Cosme was at an antiques market in Rio de Janeiro when he came across a pile of film negatives on the ground. “Nobody wanted them,” the seller said. They were priced at $2.
“I came home with two bags of negatives and wondered what I was doing with my life,” he recalled.
So Cosme became obsessed with lost and discarded photos of Rio’s past. Since that morning in 2018, he has amassed more than 150,000 film photographs and negatives, most of them taken by amateurs, that tell the story of Rio de Janeiro’s history from the 1890s to the 1980s, with each passing moment.
He noticed that one theme continued to emerge more frequently than any other in his work.
carnival.
Rio’s annual mass outpouring – a four-day eruption of art and music, costumes and joy – kicked off again on Saturday.
The festival is a symbol of Rio around the world and has become a powerful driving force in Rio culture.
“You can’t study the city without visiting the carnival,” Cosme said.
But through images taken over the decades by photographers whose names have been lost to history, we can see how Carnival changed with the city, and vice versa.
From sepia-toned century-old prints to saturated Kodachrome slides from six decades ago, the images reveal changing trends in society, humor, fashion, drug use and sexual liberalization.
Photographs taken by amateurs with the cameras of that time often have a rough beauty and a special intimacy compared to today’s digital perfection.
“I realized there are endless stories to tell about this city,” said Cosme, who discovered the lost photos of Rio, “because in every home and closet there are boxes full of new discoveries.”
Dado Galdieri (The New York Times)
Carnival is a multi-day celebration that precedes the Christian holiday of Lent and was brought to Brazil by Portuguese colonialists, where it has maintained European traditions for centuries. Carnival is a kind of costume party, where participants hide their true identities and play pranks on their neighbors.
By the mid-19th century, Brazilians were taking to the streets to party with music, dancing and revelry, and in the 20th century it turned into a full-blown party.
Around that time, Rio’s wealthy elite began parading around the city in open cars during carnival, according to historian Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha, who has written a book about Rio Carnival.
It was also a way to show off wealth, she says, but the trend fell out of favor with the elites in the 1930s as suburbanites pooled together to rent cars and parade them around.
Though Carnival is constantly evolving, it’s still a costume party, and photos show that many people, especially Brazil’s poor, create creative costumes from materials they can find at home.
“Mothers sewed and embroidered for their children so that they would look beautiful at carnival,” Pereira Cunha said, “and they wanted their photos taken.”
The costumes were also satirical and playful, often referencing pop culture and current events that aren’t necessarily as overtly represented today.
One of the most popular costumes was a man dressed as a woman. This costume was designed as a joke and frequently played on sexist tropes, so it fell out of favor over time.
Clown costumes have long been popular, but have become more sinister over the decades, with people dressed as clowns often attempting to scare other festival-goers.
Eventually, men on the outskirts of Rio created a style called “bate bola,” or “slam ball,” a scary clown costume that slams a ball attached to a rope into the street. This type of costume, seen in the fifth image below, became famous for scaring children and is still common today.
In the 1910s, people began carrying glass bottles filled with ether-based scented liquids that produced a temporary euphoric sensation. The bottles were later replaced by pressurized cans. They were called “lansat perfumes” or “perfume jets.”
Festival-goers often spray the mixture into crowds and strangers to lure them, said Felipe Ferreira, a carnival historian at Rio de Janeiro State University.
The government banned the spray in 1961, but stronger versions are still used illegally.
If you look closely at these photos, you can see people carrying bottles and cans.
In the 20th century, street bands called “blox” also emerged and became an integral part of Brazilian Carnival, and still are today: blox are like social clubs that play music in the streets with drums, horns and often matching costumes.
They frequently marched through the city, livening up impromptu parties, with different blocks offering different styles of music, costumes and themes.
The late 1920s saw the emergence of so-called samba schools, formal groups of samba musicians and dancers who performed increasingly elaborate shows that told stories through costumes, lyrics and dance.
They were made up mainly of black residents from poor neighborhoods and focused on celebrating Afro-Brazilian traditions.
It became such a popular attraction at Rio’s Carnival that the city closed off the main street for the school parade and set up large decorations and grandstands, as seen in the photo below, while the schools adopted even more extravagant costumes and floats.
Today the parade remains the highlight of Rio’s Carnival and takes place in a purpose-built stadium built in 1984.
Producers: Craig Allen, Gray Beltran, Diego Rivadeneira.
Lis Moriconi contributed reporting.