Flavio amuses smaller brothers and sisters

Life magazine editors sent staff photographer Gordon Parks to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to document scenes from the Catacumba favela, a hillside shantytown. The resulting photo essay, “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” published in 1961, focused on the family of Flavio da Silva, the twelve-year-old boy pictured here. Parks’ intimate portraits of people without access to sanitation or regular health care humanized a problem impacting thousands of Brazilians.

In his 1975 book Moments Without Proper Names, Parks reproduced this photograph with the following caption:
Here, a boy thinks outside himself,
His mind slipping at the edges,
Creeping toward a shawl of darkness.