But I learned of something even more exciting yesterday, also involving a newspaper (and other media, too!). P, the husband of my friend C, just had a stunning experience, thanks to the Times of Rio de Janeiro, O Globo. P is a photographer and human rights educator
who's worked in several countries including Brazil. He collects "found photographs" and a few years ago, in a flea market in Rio, found a stack of photographs of people at Ipanema Beach.Small format and now sepia-toned black and white, they seem to have been taken in 1962 and 1963. Most are of beautiful women, but there were also two self-portraits in a mirror, and a picture of a man in a dentist's office. P somehow managed to track down the dentist in question, and learned that the photographer - who had been his patient, had polio, and lived in the same building - had recently passed away. Eventually 4000 more photographs turned up.
P has put a few dozen of the photos into an exhibition for the Photography Biennale in Rio. The exhibition is called "A Última Hora do Verão," the last hour of summer, which P explains as referring to three things: it was the last year before the arrival of Kodacolor pictures, it was the year before the world discovered Ipanema, and - most poignantly - it was the year before the coup d'état which led to two decades of military rule. In every way it was the end of an era - though nobody could have known it would end, or how.
Anyway, P struck a nerve with this exhibit. O Globo featured some of the pictures on its front page (and more in its glossy Sunday magazine), putting all of them on a website (which I haven't been find, though I know it was in the June 24th issue; these pics I found here). Within a day,
the paper received e-mails from people who recognized (or were!) some of the women in the photographs; by the next day, every single person in the photos had been identified, and O Globo gave half of another front page to a photo of two women from the photos, then and now.The whole thing is so wonderful, so moving - and, P reminds, so political - that he's been asked to make a documentary film about it. I can hardly imagine what fascinating conversations he will have with these women, hearing how their lives changed (or didn't) once the verão ended...
(PS This was my first time to try Babelfish, the free internet translator - named of course after a denizen of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It worked perfectly in helping me get the Portuguese name of P's show.)
