Rodrigo Oliveira: Carioca, Negro, Queer

Brazilian photographer Rodrigo Oliveira lives in his childhood home in Barra de Guaratiba, a seaside suburb of Rio de Janeiro about 30 miles to the west of the city. The rural surroundings often serve as the backdrop of his compelling portraits of the Black queer community.

Oliveira started his portrait work when he returned to Brazil after studying abroad and the pandemic kept the young photographer in his home country for the first time in years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and Civil Rights Movement, he set out to document the Black queer community in his suburb and in the favelas of Rio.

“My photos of the Black community are mostly in [metropolitan] Rio,” Oliveira says. “If I photograph with a connection to the ocean or there’s a beach setting, it’s definitely here [in Barra de Guaratiba]. That’s when I’m bringing my friends over, or sometimes I want to have a date and I end up photographing the person. A lot of the time I’m with my partner, and I take a lot of photographs here with him.”