This article originally appeared on VICE UK
When Rudy Bustamante first started taking photos on the streets of Rio, strangers tried to get him to stop. "People would constantly come up and tell me to 'put the camera away,' that I was 'asking to be robbed,'" he says. "When I told them I didn't care about the camera, out came the horror stories about being stabbed, shot, kidnapped, killed. It took me a while but I learned to just ignore them, say thank you, and move on."
The results are a batch of film photos taken over a two-month period last year, before the summer Olympics descended on the city where he was born and shone a global spotlight on all the celebration and stereotyping woven into hosting the Games. As someone who lived in both "Rio proper" and Niteroi, across the bay, Rudy's seen a side to life that doesn't quite fit the City of God favela imagery so often associated with Brazil's capital.
When he was eight years old, he and his family left Rio for London, and he's lived in the UK ever since. What's he heard people from outside Brazil say about Rio? "It seems to differ according to age—older people have this golden-agey Carmen Miranda stereotype mixed with an assumption that everyone's a lovable street scamp," he says. "Whereas younger people—at least the ones I come into contact with—talk about corruption, sport, and traveling there to party, in that order. I've also had people be very surprised that I'm white, shit at football, and had enough money to travel to the UK."
Living that pseudo third-culture kid life has left Rudy in a sort of cultural limbo, which he uses his camera to explore. "I always feel alienated when I'm there," he says of Brazil. "I straddle the cultures in a way—I end up fitting in just well enough that everyone expects me to know the ways of the city, but not well enough to actually be a part of it."
He ends up approaching his photos from a perspective that tries to be sensitive to possible generalizations about what life is like for people in Rio who live on opposite sides of a wealth gap. It's been funny to see how the country marketed itself to outsiders for the Olympics, for example with the "'spicy Brazilian barbecue sauce' promotions every food outlet is doing. I don't know if they've just not consulted any Brazilians or are playing to stereotypes, but Brazilian food is, at its spiciest, remarkably mild compared to the UK; and slathering pungent sauce all over your meat is pretty much anathema."
Sauce aside, Rudy says he does his best to let the photos speak for themselves, capturing the day-to-day mundanity of a suburban life that's more universal than the average tourist might think. "I won't pretend I have any kind of objective point of view of the country—rather, the attempt with the project was to show an entirely subjective, gut-feeling profile of an area. It's not how all Brazilians view the country by any stretch, but it is at least how one Brazilian views the country—probably with an uncommon dose of outsider's perspective." Not even the well-meaning suggestions to put his camera away was going to hold that back.
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