Photos

rbcy1974 (20742) 2008-01-15 2:55

Hello Adam:
I gave you a long reply to your comment on my photo, I dont know if you read it or not.
About the photo, the colours are nice, although I find the photo a bit dark. There is a nice pattern repetition with the houses repeating themselves. The photo is missing some sharpness though.
About the favela's. While there is of course a lot of poverty in Brazil and elsewhere in the third world, I think that often times, westerners get a worse impression of the reality due to their own prejudices. (I am not saying this is your case as you have obviously spent some time inside these places rather than watching them from a car). However the western prejudice says that nice = good, and ugly = poor. We tend to have strict estetic standards in the west (including the western minded middle classes in latin america) where everything needs to match, be well painted and be pretty, otherwise it is a synonim of poverty. However people who have grown up poor or under different cultural paradigms do not give as high importance to estetics, so their houses may look poorer than they really are to our eyes. By looking at your photo, I see a whole bunch of uneven houses, but built witch brick, and I see electrical poles, the definition is not good enough, but I bet you there are stelite dishes in many of them. Yes they are poor, but they are still lucky compared to a large number of people in the world who do not have a brick made house, electricity and TV. Still not a reason to neglect them, and I think that Brasil has made great strides in reducing poverty in the last decade.
Cheers
Daniel

Docarmo (8814) 2008-01-28 22:11

Hi Adam,
Very impressive point of view. Although it represents a wound difficult to heal, I like the visual of the houses on the hill. Very well composed with the Brazilian flag.
I agree with you that this situation is very confusing and sad, contributing to bad results. It is becoming more and more worrying.
Thanks for sharing,
MC
P.S.: Your picture shows a very interesting particularity happening in Belo Horizonte, like in other big cities of Brazil. I was born in Belo Horizonte (a long time ago ;-) and I remember when the hills were green and only flowers grew there. Then, very poor people coming from countryside constructed their houses on the hills, without having bought any piece of land. They just settled where they wanted, without any previous planning neither authorization or license. It explains the threat of collapse caused by the rain, as you've mentioned - sometimes they don't choose the right place.
Meanwhile, middle class and rich people buy their houses on the low places of the city.
In other countries, rich people pay fortunes to have a house on the mountain. It is crazy, isn't it?