In an important moment in the art industry, diverse aesthetic and artistic manifestations seek to capture the Afro-Brazilian subjectivity, #BLVCKSBTFLL - Black is Beautiful is born in Bahia, which was the port of entry of the slave ships in Brazil.

These images propose a generous look on the black body as a form of historical repair of the image constructed of people of colour over the years, most often stigmatising and marginalising this body, silencing their spiritual and phenotypic powers that in turn have their self-esteem compromised, reflecting a structural racism that made blacks deny their own image by “whitening” their existence to feel they belonged  within a society ruled by white supremacy.

Without artifice, lack of cultural values, religious and sexual orientation, the composition of images seeks to reveal the black genesis, bringing together elements that point to a place of origin: nature, the cradle of the ancestry of the bodies photographed.

The title of the project is a reference to the Black-and-Beautiful African-American cultural movement that happened in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, deconstructing the notion instilled by racism that the natural black phenotype is ugly or less attractive than the Eurocentric beauty standard.

Writing by Pedro Henrique França. Pedro is a  journalist, author, screenwriter and an admirer of Thiago Borba’s work.