The Rio Lens of José Medeiros: Capturing the Soul of Brazil

dthholland
May 7
4 min read

Vintage beach scenes with people playing and relaxing, vintage cars parked by ocean, and Rio de Janeiro backdrop with a retro vibe.

In the quiet, sun-drenched city of Teresina, in Brazil’s Nordeste region, José Medeiros was born in 1921. By the age of twelve, he was already learning how to handle a camera under the guidance of his father. It was an early education that set him on the path to becoming one of Brazil’s most celebrated photographers. But it wasn’t until he moved to Rio de Janeiro at 18 that his journey really began to take shape.

Initially enrolled to study architecture, Medeiros quickly found himself drawn toward something more immediate and visceral, the world of visual storytelling. Rio in the 1940s was a city of contradictions: at once glamorous and gritty, shaped by samba and state control, by poverty and poetic urban chaos. Medeiros stepped into this landscape with a camera, not a blueprint, and started capturing life as it was lived on the streets, in the favelas, and among the cultural elite.

Woman in sunglasses at a beach, with people playing in the sand and a beach ball in the air. The scene is relaxed and vintage.

A New Era with O Cruzeiro

Everything changed for Medeiros after World War II. The French photojournalist Jean Manzon, who had recently begun working on a new illustrated magazine in Brazil called O Cruzeiro, recognised Medeiros’s talent and invited him to join the team. This wasn’t just any magazine, it was Brazil’s most influential photojournalistic publication of the mid-20th century. O Cruzeiro had a circulation that reached millions, and its visual storytelling played a crucial role in shaping the Brazilian public’s sense of identity.

Woman in a white swimsuit walking on a sandy beach, covering her face. Waves crash behind her, with hazy islands in the background.

For Medeiros, it was a formative chapter. “A new adventure full of liberty and boldness,” he once described it. His work at O Cruzeiro combined photojournalism with an almost ethnographic attention to detail. He photographed Brazilian celebrities, sure—but he also documented rituals of Afro-Brazilian religions, street workers, carnival performers, and the intimate realities of life in Rio’s hillsides and slums. He took photographs in Candomblé terreiros, capturing the vibrancy of Brazil’s African heritage at a time when such representation was rare and politically charged.

Deserted beach promenade with high-rise buildings on the right. Misty sky, distant mountains. Monochrome, calm atmosphere.

The Rio of Everyday Life

Medeiros’s Rio wasn’t just the city of beaches and samba, it was a sprawling, living organism with contrasting rhythms. His photographs caught the subtleties of people’s expressions, the movement of dancers, the solemnity of religious ceremonies, and the spontaneous energy of public life. He didn’t shy away from complexity, nor did he aim to beautify struggle. He sought, instead, to reflect truth, and his Rio is a place of nuance, where joy and hardship often share the same frame.

Woman in a patterned dress sprinkles confetti over her head. She's wearing a headband and bracelets. Neutral background, soft light.

One of his most iconic series features the processions and dances of Afro-Brazilian religious communities. These images are neither romanticised nor exoticised. Instead, they hold space for cultural practices that were marginalised by mainstream society and sometimes repressed by the state. Medeiros photographed these events with deep respect and a genuine desire to understand, offering a quiet counter-narrative to the dominant stories of Brazilian modernity pushed by the Vargas regime.

A person with closed eyes sits in a dim room, surrounded by hands holding a candle and a bottle. Rustic walls and a calendar in the background.

Navigating the Politics of the Lens

It’s impossible to discuss José Medeiros without acknowledging the political currents that shaped his era. Working at O Cruzeiro, a magazine that, while groundbreaking, also functioned within the ideological orbit of Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian regime, meant negotiating a fine line between creative freedom and state-endorsed narratives. Medeiros’s photographs helped visualise the construction of a unified Brazilian identity, even as they subtly questioned it.

Man in hat writing at desk in tiled room with vintage posters and signs. Dim setting evokes a contemplative, nostalgic mood.

This tension gave his work depth. His photographs reflect not only moments of celebration and national pride but also the ambiguities and contradictions beneath the surface. He managed to participate in the state’s storytelling apparatus while also gently subverting it through his attention to Brazil’s true diversity. It’s one of the reasons why his images continue to resonate: they are documents of their time, but never propaganda.

Four people converse in a dim room with a poster behind them. One person leans on a chair, creating an engaged and lively atmosphere.

A Lasting Legacy Preserved at IMS

When José Medeiros passed away in 1990, he left behind a vast archive of images—nearly 20,000 negatives, now held in the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS). The IMS, which is one of Brazil’s foremost cultural institutions, has played a crucial role in preserving and showcasing his legacy. His photographs are also part of museum collections around the world, a testament to their enduring power and international significance.

Women in swimsuits on a beach; one sits in the sand, relaxed. Others stand and walk near the shore. Ocean waves and cloudy sky in the background.

Today, Medeiros is remembered as a pioneer of Brazilian photojournalism, a man whose lens captured the multiplicity of a nation in transition. Through his images, viewers can see Rio de Janeiro not as a stereotype or postcard, but as a complex, breathing city. His work remains essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand Brazil’s cultural fabric, especially during the mid-20th century.

Aerial view of a coastal cityscape and mountains under a partly cloudy sky, wing of a plane visible in the foreground. Black and white.

José Medeiros and the Modern Gaze

While Medeiros was part of a broader movement of Latin American documentary photography, his work has a distinct character, calm, unflinching, deeply humane. He wasn’t chasing drama; he was chasing truth. And his truth was one that acknowledged joy as well as pain, visibility as well as erasure.

A couple walks arm in arm on a city street with palm trees, while people and an old car are nearby. The scene is lively and vintage.

Through his Rio lens, Medeiros helped Brazilians, and the world, see the country in a fuller light. Not just the glamour of Copacabana or the exoticism of Carnival, but the daily lives of people often left out of the national story. His photographs remind us that to look closely is to care, and that the camera, in the right hands, is an instrument of profound empathy.