Engineer and Photographer Giorgio Negro is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘San Francesco in Caninde’. To see Giorgio’s body of work, click on any image.

Canindé is a small sleepy town located in the heart of the sertão, an almost desert region in the northeastern Brazil. It would be a quiet and anonymous provincial town if it were not that every year it hosts the second largest pilgrimage in the world dedicated to the figure of San Francesco of Assisi.

In October, an immense multitude of devotees invade the city, coming from the most remote corners of that region, traditionally very Catholic. These are humble people who demonstrate their faith with practices typical of local religious culture: if on the one hand they accept the dogmas imposed by the Church, on the other they do not renounce their patrimony traditions, where faith is confused with superstitions and mixed with popular beliefs.

In the days of the feast of San Francesco, Canindé turns into a living painting representing that popular Catholicism, the one which made devotion to the saints the fulcrum of common people’s religious universe, guaranteeing with it the impulse for spreading the official Catholicism.

In this scenario, Photography too becomes center stage: itinerant photographers looking for customers, pilgrims and onlookers with their inevitable selfies, and going as far as being consecrated as the object of faith, in the hands of the many devotees who offer photographs and images of all kinds as “ex-voto” to the Saint.