A Stroll Through Sao Paulo’s Guts

What happens when a group of friends made up of photography-lovers and professional photographers meet for some beers at a local bar? They talk about photography. At first, all they did was talk, but soon one of them came up with the inevitable idea: to go out on the streets and photograph São Paulo’s B-side at night.

That’s how the Rolê (a Brazilian slang which means “stroll”, in a free translation) initiative began, five years and thousands of pictures ago. During this period, the group managed to create a very peculiar portrait of the metropolis and its people, avoiding clichés in an anti-postcard fashion. None of their pictures are credited to a single photographer, since they always go out together on their nightly strolls and photograph as a group.

To celebrate its fifth anniversary, Rolê organized an exhibition called Vísceras Paulistanas (São Paulo’s Guts), an allusion to the places and people depicted in their photographs, which are the hidden facet of the city: images rarely seen or noticed by most people during the day, which become strangely evident at night. The exhibition, which also included night photography workshops, ended last weekend.

This unique point of view frequently results in images that are aesthetically pleasing but emotionally disturbing, a conflict that reflects the contradictory feelings that life in São Paulo is bound to trigger.