In pictures: this zine celebrates the beauty of queer youth culture in Rio

There’s an image of a young woman kneeling down in a river. She’s wearing a mask that harks back to centuries-old Brazilian folklore and a shirt for the country’s national football team. This study in contrasts – an older, spiritual tradition alongside a more contemporary, secular one – embodies a deep, political tension.

Photographer William Rice, whose new publication O Novo Rio explores this tension through portraits of people in Rio de Janeiro, who are captured in states of bliss, intimacy, and beauty. Rice, who has been travelling to Rio for almost a decade, took the pictures that would become O Novo Rio in the midst of populist president Jair Bolsonaro’s time in office; a period of far-right politics that were actively homophobic and transphobic. This is one of the reasons why, as Rice puts it, “the Brazil shirt, to me, worn in this kind of environment, shot by someone like me, styled by someone like Rafaela [Pinah] is strongly about resistance.”

Rice explains that Bolsonaro – Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022 – and his followers adopted the nation’s football shirt as a kind of political uniform. “It became like the Make America Great Again hat,” the photographer tells Dazed. Rice recalls that this made the Brazilian football shirt become “really ugly”, in stark contrast to his own understanding of what the shirt meant historically. “When I watched the Brazilian football team in the 80s and 90s, there was such an unbelievable set of players […] and anyone could wear a Brazilian football shirt, in or out of Brazil – male, female, gay, straight. And Bolsonaro horribly politicised it. So to have a trans stylist put a young Brazilian woman in that football shirt was, to me, a fuck you move.”

A lot of O Novo Rio ties back to Rice’s own experiences as a young queer person; Rice says that he “didn’t feel entirely comfortable in [his] own queerness until [his] mid-to-late twenties”; showing queer spaces in this zine became a kind of antidote for that adolescent loneliness and a way to make sure others don’t get lost in what Rice called the “dislocating” feelings of growing up alone and queer. Instead, the Brazillian models featured in Rice’s monograph – most of whom are in their late tweens and early-to-mid 20s – possess what the photographer describes as “incredible amounts of agency over their own presentation and their own queerness, and part of me is kind of in awe of them.” Again, O Novo Rio becomes a kind of study in contrasts; as Rice puts it: “people are in really difficult social and political circumstances, but it will never stop them being themselves.” 

Rice describes much of this work – even the more stylised, produced images within it – as a documentary on Rio’s young people at this specific moment in time. The photographer explains that some of the awe and respect he has for the people in these pictures comes from the fact that they “live with much more agency than I was when I was their age”. Reflecting on the status of being an outsider, he writes in the introduction to the book, “This whole book is informed by an innate sense of being an outsider... When you’re queer, you’re automatically an outsider.” But he insists that this status comes with the need to treat everyone with the “respect of being in someone else’s house”.

An important aspect of the book is the photographer’s collaborations with stylists such as Rafaela Pinah and the impact they have on the work. He says that this outsider status means noticing things that you might “take for granted” while on the inside. For Rice, this meant recognising how a group of queer people might talk to each other or carry themselves. O Novo Rio becomes a celebration of these people, and Rice hopes that it can not only celebrate their agency, but also “make sure that we don’t move backwards, because there’s a lot of people that want us to move backwards”.

William Rice’s O Novo Rio is available in store at DSM now