In 2024, all around the Northern Hemisphere, Ash Wednesday also happens to be the official day to celebrate love and loved ones. But on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Christian holy day has a different meaning. As we speak, Brazil is wrapping up the last day of its legendary Carnival weekend. What, for international eyes, might come across as a destination big party, drenched in little-to-no-clothes partygoers, saturated tailfeathers and never-ending layers of glitter, samba schools parades and extravaganza.

To some extent, that’s all true. But for natives, or those who are interested in cracking the shells of stereotypes to experience tradition, the celebration is an ode to an idealistic life with no repressions, the fluidity of the human experience and a non-age related side of youth. Carnival is pure bliss, a time for cultural appreciation and re-connection with our roots, but also a political act, a place for encounters and social activism, manifested through traditional songs, costumes and photography.

As a Brazilian myself, when talking about my country and Carnival to someone who’s never stepped their feet in the sands of Copacabana beach, I commonly find my vocabulary empty of synonyms for… fun. I’m convinced that Brazilians learned how to experience life differently than other countries and cultures, always ready to make the best out of any situation. And Carnival might be when all this energy surfaces and channels its epitome. From North to South, there’s a spine-chilling general sense of connection between the thousands that take to the streets from dawn to dusk, following crowds with unknown destinations, embracing the rawest, sweatiest and most genuine form of happiness, under a 40 degrees sun, as summer hits its peak.

But as I connected with Northern Irish photographer William Rice, ahead of the release of his photography book, “O Novo Rio”, I immediately knew that, on the other side of that Zoom call, was someone that understood what I was talking about with ease. After over 20 years of working in the music industry acting as a consultant to Sinead O’Connor, Prince & Björk, William embarked on a five-year journey across the globe in which he repeatedly travelled to Rio De Janeiro, between 2015-2022. In fact, Rice himself had a lot to teach me about a side of my country that I’m not as familiar with.

From the steep hikes to the Sugarloaf mountain and the juiciest tropical fruits to the sticky floors of one of the world’s biggest gay nightclubs, he encountered in the Carioca capital a fascinating life. One that, in many subtle forms, was similar to the reality he experienced himself as a queer teenager growing up in the most turbulent of times in 1980’s Ireland. Through his camera, Rice portraits Rio’s youth and queerness, in a time when Brazil was under the government of hard right populist president Jair Bolsonaro, one of the most pro-actively homophobic and transphobic leaders in the world.

Rice’s work is a beautiful, soulful and heartwarming portrait of Rio’s juxtapositions, booming youth, subversions and queer fluidity. Working alongside Brazilian collaborators, such as stylist Rafaela Pinah and fellow photographer Rodrigo Oliveira, he constructs a layered tale around the intersection between sexuality, identity, religion and nationalism, bringing to the forefront of his lens what makes the best of Brazil: its people.

Keep scrolling to read our conversation with William Rice…

When was the first time you went to Brazil? Talk me through how everything started, and the first time this interest sparked.
There’s a very long backstory to my relationship with Brazil, which goes right back to being a kid in the 80s. And I think the first time I was aware of it was when I saw a James Bond film called Moonraker, which is incredibly cheesy. And it’s totally sexist and racist and terrible. But at the time, these Bond films were a big thing. And there were some scenes shot in Rio. And there was a fight scene on the cable car on the way up to Sugarloaf mountain. And I just thought it looked like the most insane place I’d ever seen, it was just so otherworldly.

The Irish countryside is very green and flat, and it’s very beautiful, but it’s the polar opposite of Brazil. So when I first saw it, I thought it just looked like another planet. It just looked amazing. But I didn’t really think too much more about it and it just kind of slipped the back of my mind. But I had some friends who, one of whom had a Brazilian boyfriend based in the UK. So they were going to Rio on holiday, and asked me to come along and I went along, sort of not knowing too much about it, but enough. That was in the early 2000s, I think. And I was in a very long time and I really, I just immediately loved it, loved the energy and, obviously, it’s incredibly beautiful, like spectacular landscapes. A very kind of particular way of life there that’s very unique. I think it is unique even in terms of the rest of Brazil. There’s a very specific way of living that you have in a beach city. And it’s obviously incredibly diverse and just kind of like a generally exciting place to go. And I went in the British winter, so obviously the weather was incredible and it was really kind of just really exciting to be there. It just felt great to be there and it felt really happy and uplifting. So really from the get-go, I really liked it.

And what were your first impressions?
On my first visit, I remember being quite surprised by a lot of things. I think mainly how kind of real it was, which I think had a lot to do with my perception of what Rio was from the outside, based on the information that I’ve been given here. I’m interested in things like music and fashion and film and all the kind of typical things that people here are into. And the way that Rio was presented in those forms was quite specific, fashion photography was very specific. It was very much about beach bodies, a very particular kind of race, body type, gender, sexuality. It was the way, that’s how it was then.

And likewise, we saw a lot of the carnival here. We see films that were, or documentaries that were set in the favelas. So there were kind of very specific clichés about Rio, which were coming across in the Western world. So the Western media and the British media, and those clichés aren’t specific to Brazil. Every country around the world is shown in a certain way in Western media. But I was really, and those ways are very kind of reductive, but I was really taken aback by just how real Rio was and how vast it was and how much more to it there was than the kind of specific things that we’d seen in our culture here and how kind of clichéd and limiting those things were. So the initial trip was very eye-opening for me. And I think that kind of really hooked me into wanting to know more about it.

And then there was a very long break. That was the early 2000s. And then I was working in London, so working that whole time, and then I quit my job in the mid-10s, 2015, 2016, to go travelling and Rio was the first place I went. And I was there for a few weeks. Again, really loved it. Initially, I was using it as a base to kind of travel around South America. Because you can get easy flights from London. I had a bunch of air miles, so I could get quite cheap flights there as well. So over the next two or three years, I was coming in and out of Brazil. I was travelling around the rest of Brazil as much as I could. So going to the north, obviously Sao Paulo and places like Manaus. And every time I’d go, I would either come in or out from Rio.

And each time I was in Rio, even if it was just for a few days, I’d kind of… It’s hard to explain. It kind of gets under your skin a little bit, there’s a very special feeling there. When it’s raining, it’s really beautiful and kind of melancholy and it kind of gets into your soul a little bit. It’s a very special place. And then I think probably sort of 2018, 2019, I started going back, but very specifically just to Rio and sometimes spending maybe two or three months there at a time. And yeah, I don’t even know where to start with the reasons I like it and the reasons I started photographing there. But, it’s just, when you travel, you see everything much more clearly. And it’s the smallest details that I love. It’s like going into a supermarket and just seeing a huge row of papayas or something. That’s so exciting. And like the smell of tropical fruit. Or you go along a couple more shops and there’s like a fish, somewhere selling fish and there’s like amazing fresh seafood. And there’s kind of a noise on the street there and in the morning everyone’s getting coffee and breakfast and going to work.

And it’s just, to me, it’s very exciting. There’s like an energy there. As you mentioned earlier, it’s not, in Brazil and Rio, they’re not without their problems. I think politically and socially, there are all kinds of issues there. When you’re a visitor, it takes a few times to kind of dig a bit deeper and learn about those and educate yourself about those and kind of understand them.

You were discussing how much of what you knew about Brazil growing up in the U.K. was based on stereotypes. It’s so common; to this day, I’m shocked by the disparities between the perceptions of Brazil abroad and the reality. Is that something you consciously tried to portray with your photography?
That was very strongly in my mind when I was photographing people because, you’re absolutely right about how, especially Brazilian women are portrayed, and Brazilian queer people, particularly Brazilian gay men, are also subject to so many stereotypes like British culture and European culture. And it was very strongly trying to avoid that, but also at the same time, just I think for me photographing everyone I photograph, the most important thing is to try and create a space where everyone has agency to be themselves and to present themselves as they want. And I’m very conscious about that. I think, firstly, when you travel, you’re a visitor in someone else’s house and you should behave with the appropriate amount of respect that comes with being a visitor in anyone else’s house. And also, I think trying really consciously not to direct people too much, because the ideas that I have on what may make a good photograph are based on the lifetime of information that I’ve absorbed living in the UK. And this is a very important thing.

It’s so easy to go in there and say to someone, “OK, turn this way, do that, show me more of this”. But I was very conscious about not working in that way. So even the pictures which seem quite stylized or look quite artistic, to me, they’re actually more like documentary images, because really what I’m doing is I’m just holding the camera. And I’m really trying to encourage everyone who’s in the photograph just to be themselves, express themselves as they want. I almost never, I don’t think there are any pictures where I told people what to do. Maybe there would be some light suggestions, if someone had run out of ideas. But it was really about just getting people together and trying to capture them, both let them be themselves and capture who they really were, but also trying to still bring the environment into that. So it felt like a local environment.

And I think it was very educational, and also very surprising to me because, of course, it’s a completely different culture, it’s a different continent, how people express themselves is very different. And also, I think another thing that was on my mind during the taking of all of these photographs was the political situation in Brazil. There’s a lot of queer people in the pictures, and this wasn’t a good time to be queer or gay or transgender in Brazil. It wasn’t a good time to be black, it wasn’t a good time to be female. It was like watching Trump in a sort of South American mirror, it was horrible. And all kinds of really horrible invocations of religion and sanctimony and a certain kind of an underlying message that if you want to go out and hit a queer person, that’s okay. It was never directly said, but you could just feel that kind of in the language.

And so I was kind of conscious of that. But it’s very… it’s a complicated feeling because you want to give people sort of pride and agency in their looks and let them be themselves. At the same time, you want to reflect the kind of realities of their life, whilst also not making or not playing into any narratives of like, “oh, queer, downtrodden queer people,” or “it’s dangerous to be transgender,” none of which are true.

And it goes back to what you said. I think you said something really insightful at the beginning, which is that actually, all of this is going on, and Brazilian people, they care about it, but they’re not going to let it stop them doing anything. And I think I kind of wish I’d had that advice before going there because, it’s so true. It’s like everyone in these pictures is being themselves, and actually it’s hard to articulate this, but like half of them is very aware of this shitty political situation and the other half of them doesn’t give a fuck about it. I don’t know how to say that. I hope there’s some hint of that in the pictures. So they’re very much my images, but they’re very also, I want to shoot thoughtfully and respectfully, and I hope that comes across.

It definitely does. What many people don’t understand is that giving a platform to people who don’t have the privilege of living in Europe or the UK, for example, also means supporting their activism. It’s a space that we don’t commonly have in Brazil, hence the importance of paving the way for these voices to shine here.
I totally agree. And I think you can be very political without being overtly political at all or seemingly not political at all. But when you understand the narrative around someone’s life or someone’s story or you put a group of like-minded people or people from a specific background, a specific community together, just standing and having your photograph taken as yourself is a political act. And one of the main folks I have for this book is that the people who were photographed will maybe see their image and think, maybe in five years’ time they’ll look back and think, “God, yeah, well, Brazil, the politics here was so shitty then, but actually it never stopped me being myself”. And that’s the most important message, I think. Because, you know, I saw this graphic, growing up myself, we see it all over the world that politicians and religious people try and stop people from being who they are, but that’s absolutely impossible. No one’s ever succeeded in that. All you do is you drive it to the side or to the underground.

So I think someone standing on the street as themselves or someone wearing what they want to wear or presenting their hair and makeup how they want to present it, that’s really powerful.

I’m fascinated by how you connected your upbringing in Northern Ireland to this project. How and when did you find common ground in your story with those of the people involved, while also acknowledging the differences in your backgrounds?
Yeah, it’s a very unusual set of circumstances, like connecting Brazil with Northern Ireland. In many ways, Brazil is the absolute polar opposite of where I grew up. And that’s actually one of the reasons I love it, because it’s so different to me and it’s all the things I didn’t like about the place I grew up, I can feel in Brazil.

And over time, I began to realise that actually there were quite a lot of similarities. So I grew up being gay in a very religious and very political environment. And actually, there are a lot of very progressive politicians in Brazil. And you’ve got a progressive president now or a relatively progressive president who really speaks up for everyone. I would say Brazil is slightly more polarised. Whereas in Northern Ireland, everyone hated gay people, it didn’t matter if you were Protestant or Catholic.

But the thing which I connected to most in Brazil was this sort of weird place where politics and religion mix. So you have organised religion and organised politics kind of working with each other and feeding off each other. And they each have agendas and they each want to try and manipulate people and get either their votes or their money. And often what happens, and this is very similar to Northern Ireland, is that any kind of minority becomes a pawn in those games. It’s queer people, but it could be black people, single mothers. You find any kind of minority grouping, and politics and religion will work together to try and exploit those minorities in order to get the most amount of votes or the most amount of money they can. And that was very similar.

And Ireland is very Catholic, which is quite similar to Brazil. Ireland is a colonised country as well. There’s just all these kind of like, little markers which are quite deep. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different, but actually, when you live there, I find that I could kind of relate to it a little bit. I also think there’s some themes of escapism in the book, like in the nightclubs. Going to a nightclub on a Saturday night, and then probably a lot of those people having to go to church on Sunday morning. That kind of reminded me of home, the idea that you might escape on a Saturday night, but then have to go in and pretend you were someone else on a Sunday morning. That was all kind of quite familiar to me.

I think politics and religion were kind of this… and I didn’t really realise that until I’ve been taking pictures for a while, and then you just watch people live their lives. And you talk to people. And I found, I think that’s why I began to shoot more and more queer people. Because initially, when I went there, I felt there’s a certain, you feel a certain responsibility. And you want to try and find some common ground before making photographs with people. And I think that was the common ground I found that allowed me to go in with a bit more confidence to make these pictures.

Were you based in Rio during those five years while working on the book, or were you still travelling around?
No, I was coming and going. I was going to South America a lot and then travelling around either Brazil or to other places in South America. I would say the most I ever spent in Rio at a time was probably about three months. So I’d maybe go for three months, then maybe go somewhere else, either in Brazil or South America, then come back to Rio or then maybe come back to Europe. So there was a lot of coming and going. The pictures were taken, I would say for the first four or five years, it was just documentary stuff, which are the images which are in between each of the chapters. And then each of the chapters, which were very intentional and produced, they were shot over the last couple of years, like 2021, 2022. And it was only maybe like 2019 or something that I began to think that I might have enough material for a publication or some kind of collection.

So from 2015 to 2018, 2019, it was really super low key documentary, just literally just walking around the streets, photographing people, photographing the beaches, the landscape. Going to the botanical gardens, doing all the kind of touristy stuff. And then sort of 20, I guess it was 2021, I think, when I first did like a producer shoot there. So like the nightclub pictures, they go back to like 2017, 2018.

There’s one picture of two guys with Ipanema in the background, which was from 2015. And actually back then, I didn’t even think I was a photographer. I just bought a camera at the airport and started taking really casual pictures. So that early stuff was very kind of naive and touristy and yeah.

How do you see the evolution of the way you started to portray the city within the time that you spent there?
Well, the first trip or trips were very touristy. I was doing a very typical tourist thing of going to Copacabana, going to Ipanema, going up Sugarloaf Mountain, the Statue of Christ. So that was probably the first couple of trips. There was a lot of that. And those photographs are okay. But I mean, looking back on them, they don’t really have any meaning or intent. And there’s not so much of that stuff in the book. There’s maybe a few from there. And then I got more adventurous as time went on and I started going to places like, I’ve always loved going to cemeteries. I think they’re a really interesting way to learn about the kind of the culture of a place.

And cemeteries in Brazil are amazing. They’re so expressive and very flamboyant, sometimes really hyper-religious and almost scary. They have these terrifying-looking monuments. And they’re really interesting places to shoot. So I was doing some stuff there. Then I started getting a little bit more adventurous in the other parts of Rio, going outside of the city limits, because I think another thing which I didn’t realise initially was just how vast the actual city limits of Rio are. And that you can drive one hour in any direction and you’re still actually inside the city of Rio. Just exploring the city a lot more and going to places that were maybe a little bit less off the beaten track, and going to some of the favelas. And each time just kind of pushing myself a little bit more to go a little bit further with it. And that’s the end result in the book, I think.

As we go through some of the pages together, I point out my favourite image from the book, which you can see above.
I love that one as well. And that was all done with a stylist called Rafaela Pinah, who I’d strongly recommend you look up her work. She’s brilliant and based in Rio. And she was really helpful, along with another guy called Rodrigo Oliveira, who helped produce them and introduced me to Rafaela. So a lot of these images were basically them kind of gathering their friends and introducing me to them. So that particular shot was done in a nature reserve near Barra de Guaratiba. And Rafaela was really into a Brazilian photographer called Walter Firmo, who made some amazing images in the 70s and 80s of Brazilian culture, especially folklore. So that’s where a lot of those colours come from, which I find so interesting. And I think it’s incredible to look at. So she was doing a modern take on that kind of traditional folklore, with elements of colours and shapes and flamboyance and expression.

She was such a privilege to work with and helped produce those amazing images. And the models are amazing as well. And they’re all street cast. They don’t have agencies, which I was really thrilled about. I think it’s really incredible that it, again, to keep it all slightly more real and away from those kind of traditional images of Brazil and Brazilian models that we even still see in like fashion magazines. So yeah, they’re all street casting and friends of friends. I mean, that’s a typical example of how I really was just holding the camera. It’s just like these incredible people dressed up by these incredible other creatives. And I just had to take their picture. I had the easiest job.

I actually wanted to ask you about that because a lot of the collaborators that you brought to this project are Brazilians. How important was it for you to bring on these creative forces from the country to the project as well? Do you think that added to the way you wanted to represent Rio?

It was 100% crucial. And in fact, if I hadn’t found those people like Rodrigo, the producer, or Rafaela, and various other people, there’s another really fantastic art director in Brazil called Pedro Flutt. And it was through them that I found people to shoot, find clothing, some of the stuff that’s on the beach. There’s like a picture of a guy who’s wearing a headpiece made out of can ring-pulls, which the designer had found on the beach. Every single person, I’m the only non-Brazilian person involved in these pictures in any shape or form, and that was really important to me. Because, again, when you see fashion images of Brazil, very often the only people who are Brazilian are the models.

So it’s like they’ll work with the models and they’ll use them, who again, are in that very, very kind of narrow view of what someone in Brazil looks like. But then the entire backstage cast, so from photography, hair and makeup, they’re all shipped in, they come from North America and they come from Europe. And I don’t want to denigrate that because I understand that it brings work and money and may lead to opportunities for the models. But it’s a very, very narrow-minded way of doing it. So to be honest, if I hadn’t been able to find the people that are in the book, this book would have never happened. Because otherwise, it’s inauthentic. The only way to be authentic is to create these kinds of spaces for them. So people from the world that I was most interested in could express themselves. Everything is local.

“O NOVO RIO” will be available at Dover Street Market from the 16th of February.