The annual Zum Festival, held in early November at the prestigious Moreira Salles Institute in São Paulo, has emerged as Brazil's premier destination for contemporary photography enthusiasts. This comprehensive cultural event features an impressive array of talks, workshops, exhibitions, and a highly anticipated photobook fair that showcases the finest works from Brazil's thriving independent publishing ecosystem.
Organized by Zum, the institute's outstanding semi-annual photography magazine coordinated by Thyago Nogueira, the festival has become a crucial compass for identifying the most interesting and innovative developments in contemporary visual culture both within Brazil and internationally. The magazine itself has gained recognition as a leading voice in the photography world, making its associated festival a must-attend event for industry professionals and enthusiasts alike.
This year's festival received an overwhelming response to its photobook open call, with 182 projects submitted for consideration. From this impressive pool, organizers carefully selected 45 works for inclusion in the festival, ultimately awarding three projects with special recognition. The selection process highlighted the remarkable depth and diversity of Brazil's independent publishing scene, which has evolved into a fertile and dynamic ecosystem over recent years.
The Brazilian independent publishing landscape now includes several notable publishers such as Lovely House, Piscina Pública, Fotô, Gris, Livraria Madalena, Selo Turvo, and LP Press, alongside a wealth of self-published works. These publishers represent a niche production segment that, with few exceptions, rarely reaches commercial bookstores, making festivals like Zum essential for discovering and appreciating these unique publications.
This year's selection continues a familiar trend of projects that delve deep into family archives in efforts to reconstruct personal histories. While some of these works can result in somewhat hermetic books, the overall quality demonstrates impressive mastery of narrative construction, graphic design, and printing techniques. This evolution reveals how significantly this niche market has refined itself over the years, achieving professional standards that rival mainstream publications.
Reflecting the institute's ongoing commitment to amplifying marginalized voices and invisible productions, this year's selection features a vibrant collection of publications portraying multiple social contexts and realities. Notable examples include bold fanzines depicting scenes of explicit violence in urban peripheries, such as "Tarja preta e efeito colateral" by Alan Lima and "Mataram um boe na rua de cima" by Everson dos Santos de Andrade. The selection also includes "01 por todo e todo por 01" by Ck Martinelli and Luiz 83, which documents the daily lives of app-based delivery workers, and "Olhares que Falam" by Rodrigo Koraicho and students from CCA São Domingos Sávio, recording a community being displaced from downtown São Paulo by local authorities.
Among the numerous outstanding proposals, four projects particularly stood out as exceptional examples of the vast variety of graphic languages on display. "Tropical Trauma Misery Tour" by Brazilian-born artist and editor Rafael Roncato, with design by Mateus Acioli, transforms the 2018 knife attack on presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro into a sophisticated dissection of fanaticism and manipulation. Published in 2024, this experimental work comments on the machinery of digital populism, where the boundary between truth and fabrication dissolves into pixels and calculated staging. The book opens with a warning about strobe lighting effects, sudden loud noises, theatrical fog, scenes of violence, and adult content, setting the tone for its provocative approach.
"The Iconomist," now in its eighth issue, represents a third-generation research project and artist's magazine designed by From Brazil With Love Studio and published by Zero Edition, both run by artist Romeu Silveira. Fascinated by the dizzying universe of images circulating online, Silveira has developed a continuous visual research practice using books as his primary platform. Over five years, he has produced an impressive flow of publications filled with graphic experiments that construct narratives from images appropriated from social networks, including works like "Passers-by" (2025) and "Stories/To Store" (2023).
Mariana Feldhues' "Viagem ao Brasil (1865–1866): a desordem da carne" presents a powerful rewriting of Louis Agassiz and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz's travel diary from the Thayer Scientific Expedition. Working with analog processes and paper physicality, Feldhues intervenes directly in the original book, experimenting with procedures that summon depth, magic, and fantasy while pressing images flat against pages. The work seeks to disorder the original writing to reaffirm plural, infinite existence within pages where subjects were once inscribed as socially dead.
Finally, "Doce Sonâmbulo" (Sweet Sleepwalker) by Desali offers an intimate portrayal of life in Bairro Nacional, a suburb of Contagem, Minas Gerais. The artist, son of a white father he never met and a Black mother who worked as a housekeeper, uses his analog photographic archive to create a cinematic journey through peripheral neighborhoods, downtown nightlife, and experimental darkroom processes. The 400-page black-and-white book, with its Xerox-like printing quality, demonstrates remarkable narrative acuity in revealing a deeply personal universe shaped by Brazil's social realities.
For those interested in further exploring São Paulo's photobook scene, several key locations offer continued access to this vibrant culture. The Instituto Moreira Salles Library at Avenida Paulista provides free public access to an extensive collection of photography publications. Lovely House operates a bookstore in Galeria Metrópole, selling both their own titles and publications from other small presses and independent authors, making it an excellent destination for contemporary Brazilian photobook discoveries.
