Carioca's Revenge

Brazil was not amused to see itself in a five-part LIFE Magazine study of Latin America last spring. Photographer Gordon Parks had paid a visit to a Rio de Janeiro favela, or slum, and recorded with his camera the often noted but still incredible squalor in which the favelados live--within a ten-minute drive of Rio's beautiful Copacabana Beach. But if Brazilians were stung by the truths of LIFE'S camera, by last week in the pages of O Cruzeiro (circ. 700,000), Brazil's largest picture magazine, they were reaping the rich satisfaction of having retaliated specifically in kind.

In a precise imitation of Parks's performance, O Cruzeiro sent one of its own cameramen, Henri Ballot, to New York. There on Manhattan's Lower East Side, "five minutes by car from Wall Street," Ballot found exactly what he was sent to find: a New York family living in the same poverty and filth that LIFE'S camera had shown in the Rio slum. Photographer Ballot sighted in on the family of Felix Gonzales, 53, a Puerto Rican immigrant and part-time car washer.

O Cruzeiro's account of slum life "in the shadow of the Chase Manhattan and First National City Bank'' was every bit as graphic as the LIFE study of Rio. Ballot's picture of eight Gonzaleses crowded into a single slum-house bedroom had much the same impact as Parks's shot of the Rio favelados crowded into theirs. Fact was that Ballot's most moving picture--Gonzales' frail nine-year-old son Ely-Samuel asleep on a dirty mattress and apparently crawling with cockroaches--was posed. The photographer caught and distributed the roaches for his purpose. Still, the picture was no distortion of fact: in the Gonzaleses one-room apartment Cameraman Ballot found an inexhaustible supply of his crawling photographic prop.

Played big in O Cruzeiro ("Story of the Misery in the Favelas of New York"), Ballot's photographic essay ran for 14 pages, with an accompanying text that sustained a note of righteous indignation. "In his article for LIFE," wrote O Cruzeiro's editors, "Gordon Parks chose one of the cases of most acute misery in our favelas ... As if misery were exclusively ours. It is not." Despite its set-up pictures for which it paid the Gonzales family to pose, O Cruzeiro had made its point.

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