I can soooo understand the reasons you gave for going back the day after to shoot and also the reason you brought your smaller cameras. Going into a slum area at any time, particularly at such a heated (sorry for the pun) time is something you have to consider very carefully. You have to balance personal security with the need to do your work. And maybe i’m a stupida but i don’t see what’s so wrong with f/8 and great dof. I found your work to be refreshingly open and straight-forward. The art was in the moment of the click, the compositions, the expressions on the faces..not in gimmicky overstatements of an already very dramatic event.

Seeing these pictures is like seeing someone naked. A slum usually presents a fairly ferocious looking front to the rest of the world. Go in at your own peril. Areas of conflict, always in the news, initially squatter colonies eventually made legit but always problematical. Yet, here in the photos, the slum dismantled, stripped bare..all the little luxuries, the hard-earned appliances and furniture, toys, shoes, clothes, yes and school books (the medical book photo cut me right to the core), all gone or lying in scorched disarray. No place for bad attitudes, aggressive posturing, resentment of outsiders, drugs, hanging out, getting high or domestic violence. A time of despair, hope, anger, frustration, loss, grief, fear, apprehension, frustration, hope and hopelessness. A time for the community to join together in a wider sense, people from other areas to reach out and maybe make a difference to this generation of children that just lost the precious little bit of security they had. Such a sad event. I hope some good comes out of it..perhaps a great deal of good if this little part of the world is very lucky.

Thank you,

Kathleen

Steve

Now a few replies to the comments… (our thanks for those who took the time to write, we love that there are sites that discuss the “why” of photography more than the “how”).

Haik, about the children, perhaps the reason we did not see more is that the time we arrived on the site was 6 am, and most of the kids who lived in the favela spent the night elsewhere (friends, family, etc). The fire began at around 5:30 PM on sunday, the firefighters supposedly arrived around 7:00 PM, and left around 3:45 AM. We went there a little after sunrise. There were very few kids around, the ones we saw are in the presentation. One of the first photos, an image of bare feet, is of a child’s feet. There is one girl towards the end, two kids sitting on top of a burnt house, and another may be seen towards the end bent over picking something from the ashes. Perhaps the biggest reminder of their presence is the toy at first, and the spiderman outfit on the ground.

>I am not certain what I think of the fact that you turned away from the fire itself and did not photograph.

The fire was live on television, filmed from helicopters. Sunday TV shows in Brazil have the biggest ratings and the fire was on several channels simultaneously. We’re still not certain photographing the fire would have been worthwhile. When we drove around different access points in the favela there was chaos, people running around carrying their belongings, firefighters at work, and a huge media presence. The images of the fire available online are mostly images of massive flames, and some distraught people carrying the belongings they managed to escape with. Maybe we should have photographed the fire, perhaps a wide view of the favela burning might have been useful to contextualize the story in our presentation.

> Overall, I do wonder if you would not have benefited from a somewhat tighter edit and personally, I thought your stronger shots were your B&W.

Eric, I agree on the edit. When we drove home after spending a little over an hour at the favela, we thought we would have maybe four or five decent images for a blog post on our site, and we were going to write about what we saw. In this case we feel the audio is much stronger than the images. There are several people expressing different opinions and reactions and I think the sum of these voices is what makes this work. We finished editing the audio before the photos, and had an audio sequence together before we had a final image sequence. We could cut the sound shorter, at the risk of losing some important parts of the story. Perhaps one solution might have been to have less images shown for a longer duration, that way we could preserve the sound we wanted without having to use weaker photos.

>Perhaps this couple could produce a MM piece that would solve the problem of the 20 million aids orphans in Africa.

We don’t think we could produce anything that would solve the orphan problem in Africa, or fool ourselves into believing we changed anyone’s lives in the favela by documenting their situation. These people need a place to live, and our work has not provided them with housing. However, some people have acted after seeing this presentation, and have donated clothing, food, and other much needed material. We e-mailed the link to some commercial clients and a few have contributed. For us, this is a first, and we would love to do more work that causes similar reactions.

>The photography is o.k. F/8 and be there.

I agree. To be perfectly clear, we had not been inside this particular favela before and we were unsure about safety. This work was produced independently and I had a travel editorial assignment on monday afternoon, and instead of risking equipment I would need later that day and the next, we decided to take minimal equipment. I used a Ricoh GR compact digital camera (fixed 28mm equiv. lens) and Louise used a Canon SD900 compact digital. These are amateur cameras, but their small size made our photography more discreet, and less agressive than having a large camera pointed at the face of people who were quite distraught. I missed a lot of photos due to the GR’s abominable shutter lag, but in the end the tiny cameras did the job (to a certain extent). We shouldn’t have worried and felt perfectly safe once there. We feel the most important equipment we took that day was a digital audio recorder.

>I think the combination of b/w and colour works well here in that’s it’s smooth. However, unlike Eric I prefer the colour and I think i would have liked the b/w more in colour too, although I can see why you might have chosen b/w.

We feel that since the work is the result of two photographers, we can mix two different points of view and also mix color and black and white. Some images, like the spiderman outfit on the ground, would simply not work in black and white. Others work only in black and white for us. The issue of mixing both here was first raised by our friend Hector Mediavilla, (from Pandora foto, a great collective), but it doesn’t bother us in this case.

Bjarte, “Would a photograph of the fire in the beginning do the story any harm?” Probably not. That is why we drove there during the fire. We trusted our instincts in not going in the favela at night. But in general when Louise and I see dozens of photographers covering an event we tend to go in the opposite direction and try to photograph a different side of the story.

Audrey, about the depth in our images, it is a result of using compact point and shoot cameras with tiny sensors, so everything in the photo is sharp. There are no composite images in this presentation, but I find it interesting that the choice of an amateur camera created this impression. This is not how we usually photograph and we love to use selective depth of field to isolate subjects.

David (Bowen), true, the audio can be distracting, but if one speaks portuguese so may be the images. It is possible to view the images without sound, but in this specific case I also think its possible to get a good idea of how the event affected the people by just listening to the audio track. We really believe the audio is better than the photos. Our interest was in showing how the fire affected the people and surely other media covered the fire in ways we would not have been able to (aerial photography/video really worked well for this).

The questions raised have made us think about our choices, thanks to everyone who participated.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by thomasbregulla: Burn Magazine – Louise Chin, Ignacio Aronovich: After the Fire http://bit.ly/2LBQ8o...

on the piece itself – the audio was too distracting for me.. helecopter particularly but also the dialogue.
i turned off the audio on first viewing so i could concentrate on the caption and photography, then on second viewing forgot the captions and listened and looked.. both ways worked for me and i would guess that if i spoke the language there would be no issue there. in it’s form with translation, audio and photography i found it difficult to concentrate on any single element.

that’s only me though, and audio rarely works over photography for me.. i would rather read and then view photography than be immersed in a more tele-visual experience.
where audio does work for me it truly adds to the viewing of the photography – which, again, would probably be the case here if i spoke the language.

i read a quote somewhere about war / disaster photography that it is not the ‘event’ that the public needs to see, it is the aftermath and i think this set of photos serves that goal.
watching the event itself can all too often become some kind of high adrenalin exercise where there is only reaction to the event and little thought for those effected. seeing the context and aftermath is, for me, a great deal more powerful.. quieter.. and more ponderous..

well done on getting the work to serve the people effected, as it need to.
david.

Well done Louise and Ignacio!!

I like a lot your essay, I like the depth(profoundness) in your images, I have the impression that for certain image you use 2 images, but maybe it’s a mistake… I am not very bright with the computer, is it just with Photoshop? I like this depth which you create, it gives another dimension…. I am with you in the place…

Thank you very much for sharing.

Thank you for sharing this piece with us. Like Andrea, I think that the color pieces are stronger than the black & white shots. Why? Because they are more “real”.

In this age of ubiquitous color, black and white serves 2 purposes for me: as artistic vehicle for composition, or to distance the subject matter a bit, so that is is bearable for the average viewer (i.e. Nachtwey). I think that a house fire is something that we can all relate to, and (for me) color brings the reality in a stronger fashion. Also, I was moved the audio and English translation – although, I do not speak Portuguese, the desperation (and hope!) and can be inferred from the recorded audio.

Jim, I do not think that most of the Burn viewers have the means to change the world – we do the best we can within the realms to which we are exposed and within our means. I recently came across an article in Wired magazine against foreign aid to Africa (written by an African, no less). I could not find a link to the specific article I read, but here are links to 2 similar articles by the author, Dambisa Moyo:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1894410_1893209_1893459,00.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758895999200083.html

Thanks also for sharing with us how you used this piece and your way of making your business practice.

Jim, why are you so bitter? Not everyone has to be a technician. I think you may be depressed?

Louise and Ignacio, no judging your essay and photos. It’s been done already, by the people who were gripped by the tragedy and came out to help. There is no better critical assesment than what they did in response. Kudos to another great photographic team after the Webbs.

“couples” Week on BURN! ;-)

i have a trivia question for you….who coined the phrase “f/8 and be there”?? i think i know the answer..you may think you know the answer….maybe we both have the same answer…what’s yours??