SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E3
insets showing Park’s original Rio
images.
The two magazines went to
war, each accusing the other of
staging its photographs — of, ef-
fectively, manufacturing “fake
news.” And, as happens routinely
in any polarized media environ-
ment, real people enduring real
predicaments were reduced to
pawns i n a propaganda war.
Meanwhile, in Denver, the tran-
sition proved tricky for Flávio. He
struggled at school. But things
slowly settled down. He learned
English, adapted his behavior and
spent weekends with a Portu-
guese-speaking family, the Gon-
çalves. Over time, he had less and
less contact with his family back
in Rio. And when the treatment
neared its conclusion after two
full years, he was desperate to
remain.
He begged Parks and the Gon-
çalves to adopt him. Instead, in
July 1963, Flávio returned to Rio,
where he stayed briefly with his
family before being sent to a
boarding s chool in São Paulo. The
schooling was arranged and paid
for by Life.
Parks maintained contact with
Flávio after the boy’s return to
Brazil, and in 1978, h e published a
book (“Flávio”) about the experi-
ence, which brought him back to
Rio to gather material. Parks also
visited in 1999 to film a documen-
tary (“Gordon Parks — Half Past
Autumn”). In each of those trips,
the journalist saw that his sub-
ject’s struggles with poverty had
never really abated.
“A s a photojournalist,” Parks
wrote, with more than a tinge of
melancholy, “I have occasionally
done stories that have seriously
altered human lives. In h indsight,
I often wonder if it might not have
been wiser to have left those lives
untouched, to have let them grind
out their time as fate intended.”
Flávio himself, now retired
from his job as a security guard,
later reflected on the fact that,
thanks to Parks, “people know
more about my life than I do. I’m
glad that I’m alive as a result....
[But] this story never made me
feel either better or worse than
anyone else.”
[email protected]Gordon Parks: The Flávio S tory
Through Nov. 10 at the Getty Center,
1200 Getty Center Dr., Los Angeles.
getty.edu.move out of Catacumba. Their
story had spread, and a crowd
gathered to watch. Parks, who was
there to document the day, re-
membered a woman grabbing his
shoulder a nd saying: “What about
us? All the rest of us stay here to
die!”
That same night, Parks and
Gallo drove Flávio to the airport,
and all three flew to the United
States.
In D enver, Flávio was treated at
the Children’s Asthma Research
Institute and Hospital. Life pho-
tographer Carl Iwasaki docu-
mented the first days of his life in
Denver, including visits to the
hospital, first days at school and a
visit to an amusement park. The
photographs of Flávio 2.0 — de-
signed above all, it can seem, to
make America feel good about
itself — were published in the
magazine’s July 21 issue.
The repercussions of this inter-
vention went beyond Flávio and
his family. Editors at O Cruzeiro,
an illustrated weekly in Brazil,
took umbrage at Parks’s photo
essay (which had appeared in a
Spanish-language version of Life,
distributed throughout South
America).
O Cruzeiro had Brazilian na-
tionalist leanings. Its editors ob-
jected to a high-circulation U.S.
magazine with an explicit politi-
cal agenda coming to Brazil to
point out problems that had not
been solved in its own country.
Their response was impudent,
blunt and charged with chutzpah.
They sent a photographer of their
own, Henri Ballot, to New York
City. After photographing the
streets of impoverished commu-
nities in Spanish Harlem and on
the Lower East Side, Ballot homed
in on Puerto Rican immigrants
Felix and Esther Gonzalez. They
lived with their six children in a
dilapidated, rat- and cockroach-
infested tenement building on
Rivington Street.
Ballot’s p hotographs were pub-
lished in the Oct. 7, 1 961, issue of O
Cruzeiro. They revealed living
conditions every bit as desperate
as those of the da Silvas. One
photograph shows a child sleep-
ing with three enormous cock-
roaches on his bare skin. Another
shows a child with a bandage
covering a rat bite on his fore-
head. O Cruzeiro rammed home
its point by publishing some of
Ballot’s New York images withles. The second, third and fourth
rooms uncover the bewildering
events that the photo essay set in
motion.
Parks belonged to a generation
of photojournalists whose work
could get massive exposure. He
said he wanted his work “to draw
people’s a ttention to the problems
they show” and to play a role in
effecting change. An admirer of
Kennedy, he hoped that the new
president’s youth and progressive
policies would have positive re-
sults. But he had seen firsthand,
too, that the United States lacked
credibility in Latin America. If it
wanted to solve problems there,
he realized, the United States
needed first to “clean up its own
yard.”
Intimate, observant, poetically
suggestive, Parks’s photos of
Flávio and his family were the
work of an artist. “Far from conde-
scending, they utterly personal-
ized... and made intimate the
tragedy of poverty,” Paul Roth
wrote in the show’s terrific cata-
logue. (Roth’s essay is the source
of much of the information in this
story). They “punctured,” he said,
Life magazine’s “conception of in-
digence as an abstract lure to an
ideological foe” — communism.
Parks’s photo essay was one of
the most influential Life ever pub-
lished. It provoked an enormous
response from readers, who sent
thousands of letters and unsolicit-
ed donations. When Life pub-
lished excerpts from the letters in
a subsequent issue, under the
headline “A G reat Urge t o Help,” i t
included an appeal for more do-
nations, which Life said it would
use to move the da Silvas to a
modest new home and to seek
medical treatment for Flávio.
Parks flew back to Rio on June
28 to deliver the message. To his
relief, Flávio’s parents needed no
persuading to release Flávio to the
care of a hospital in Denver. “Keep
him in hospital as long as neces-
sary but please bring him back
cured and well,” his father said.
At Parks’s hotel, Flávio had his
first-ever bath (“the water was
black,” Parks noted) and donned
new clothes that Parks had
bought for him. A team of people
worked on getting Flávio a visa
and on finding a suitable home for
his family.
The day came for the family to
FLAVIO FROM E2
exhibitionS
GORDON PARKS/THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM
Flávio da Silva in Rio in 1961. Gordon Parks would later describe the boy as “horribly thin”
with legs that looked like “sticks covered with skin and screwed into two dirty feet.”Kennedy-Center.org(202) 467- 4600Groups call
(202) 416-8400For all other ticket-related customer service inquiries,
call the Advance Sales Box Office at (202) 416-8 540Mon., Oct. 7–Fri., Nov. 15, Studio K
FREE, timed-entry tickets required. Reserve passes online in
advance, or drop in throughout the day and get passes onsite!Presenting SponsorMajor support for WNO is provided by Jacqueline Badger Mars.
David M. Rubenstein is the Presenting Underwriter of WNO.
WNO acknowledges the longstanding generosity of Life Chairman Mrs. Eugene B. Casey.
WNO’s Presenting SponsorOctober 26–November 16Opera HouseMusic by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare’s Othello
In Italian with Projected English Titles
Casting available at Kennedy-Center.org/wnoGenerous support for WNO Italian Opera is provided by Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello.
Additional support for Otello is provided by The Dallas Morse Coors Foundation
for the Performing Arts and The Dr. M. Lee Pearce Foundation, Inc.
Additional support for Dance at the Kennedy Center is provided by Susanne L. Niedland.Photo by Cade MartinMozart meets Maurice Sendakand a little magic.The MagicFluteNovember 2–23 | Opera HouseMusic by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Emanuel SchikanederIn English with Projected English Titles
Casting available at Kennedy-Center.org/wnoPhoto by Cory WeaverOtelloPepperland“High-spirited humor, eccentric charm,and a joyous musical sensibility...guaranteed to raise a smile”—The Times (UK)Mark MorrisDance GroupPhoto by Mat HaywardNov. 13–15 at 8 p.m.Nov. 16 at 2 & 8 p.m.Eisenhower Theater