Photographer Ricardo Teles is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘TRANSBRASILIANAS’. To see Ricardo’s body of work, click on any photograph.

GO 118 Road. São João da Aliança, Goiás state.

TRANSBRASILIANAS

The social universe along the paths of Brazil

Brazil, a colonial country with its interests focused on the colonizer, was built turning its eyes – and its territorial occupation – outwards, abroad, beyond the sea. Since 1500, its main cities have been established on the coast. At the beginning of the 1940s, practically all 43 million inhabitants were concentrated on the coast and looked on the interior of their own country as something exotic. The region was no more than a vast, unexplored shaded area in Brazilian geography.

MT 158 Road. Nova Xavantina, Mato Grosso state.

After the Second World War, however, the march to the west began. The Roncador-Xingu expedition was planned to explore and discover the heart of this legendary, mysterious Brazil. The movement penetrated Central of the country, revealed the south of Amazonia and established contact with diverse, hitherto unknown, indigenous ethnic groups. In the following years, a huge wave of internal immigration rewrote the country’s maps. Later, in the 1960s, President Juscelino Kubitchek consolidated this movement by transferring the country’s capital to lands in Goias, in the center of the country.

MT 358 Road, Tangará da Serra, Mato Grosso state.

MT 235 Road. Sapezal, Mato Grosso state.

The fundamental instrument that allowed for such phenomenal territorial occupation was the building of a network of highways that would connect the country. Successive governments kept the construction of new routes at the top of their strategic priority list, whether to define new frontiers of occupation in the name of national sovereignty, or to open new fronts of economic exploration.

BR 254 Highway, Chapada dos Guimarães, Mato Grosso state.

The Transbrasilianas project is the result of photographer Ricardo Teles’ travels to all corners of Brazil on different work agendas. Teles witnessed the rich universe of the side of the roads. The highway and its environs have become a constant theme in each new journey, furnishing a reading of the transformations the country is going through. Gargantuan projects like the Trans-Amazonian Highway, or the epic transportation of grain from the Midwest to the ports in the South, are some of the many stories depicted up to now in this project.

After all, these highways are the main connecting links between communities and serve as supply arteries and production transportation channels.

They synthesize the duel between the new agricultural and environmental frontiers, as well as the social universe that lives and depends on them for its survival.

Transbrasilianas is an immersion into the depths of Brazil. It shows, through Brazilian highways and the people who live around them, a picture, in some ways disconcerting, of a reality often forgotten by the greater public. It speaks, in the end, of the complexity of the life of this important section of Brazilian society, their challenges, paradigms and the uncertain paths that point to the future.

BR 418 Highway. Posto da Mata, Bahia state.

Ricardo Teles is a freelance photographer, born in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. He has been working in Sao Paulo city since 1994 as a photojournalist, who contributed to the Estado de Sao Paulo Group, agency and newspapers, from 1996 to 2000.

His work has been published in several national and international magazines, such as Der Spiegel (Germany) and National Geographic.

He is author of the books; “Saga – A Portrait of German Settlements in Brazil” (1998) and the “Terras de Preto – stories of nine rural afro communities in Brazil” (2004), that respectively received the the Martius Staden Award and Ayrton Senna Human Rights Prize of Journalism.

Among the awards received, stands the Sony World Photography Award twice, in the Sport category (2022) and Travel category (2014). He has also been twice finalist for the Global Peace Photo Award sponsored by the Austrian parliament and UNESCO (2022 and 2016).

He held several exhibitions, individual and collective, such as the Encantados exhibition in Spain during the Latitudes International Photography Festival in Huelva, at the Centro Cultural Matadoro in Madrid, at Casa Golferichs in Barcelona (2017) and in Segovia at the Palacio Quintanar during the Hay festival (2018). In 2023, he participated in PHOTOMEDFEST, the Mediterranean Photography Festival, Sicily, Italy with the exhibition Transbrasilianas, work also selected for exhibition and catalog during Discovery Awards 2022 in Braga and the Imago Lisboa Photo Festival in Portugal (2022).

The photographer’s work can be seen in the two most important Brazilian photographic collections; the MAM (Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo) and MASP (Art Museum of São Paulo) and some of his essays have also been exposed in different capitals of Brazil, in Africa, Europe and the USA.

All images and text © Ricardo Teles