Brazil: Cities of the Unfreed

Where the Walls Remember
Salvador Bahia, 2010

This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.

A gutted cocoa factory in Salvador, once the jewel of Portugal’s plantation empire, had become a living citadel of Afro‑Brazilian resistance. Dozens of families carved rooms from concrete husks, children sprinting past rust and rats while women cooked over open flames. Every laugh echoed through machinery that once ground their ancestors’ labour into European profit. When Brazil’s World Cup facelift arrived, bulldozers wiped the settlement away—proof that modern “progress” still speaks the language of colonial extraction. My negatives hold the afterimage: a boy grinning over a scavenged sweet, a stitched‑up man guarding his doorway, eyes that refused to flinch. This was no slum; it was an unrecognised society, a monument to survival inside capitalism’s abandoned shell—erased in bricks, indelible in memory.