Translator: Angelo de Oliveira Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
“A camera does not judge, it simply photographs.”
With this simple thought
my staff and I, at Dentsu Brasil, the agency I own,
set up an exposition project called “Exposição Iguais.”
It only has one objective:
to celebrate the differences among people.
For this, we invited 20 totally different Brazilians,
20 people who’d never met or seen each other,
of different colors, from different ethnic groups,
creeds, and social classes.
We took them to a photographic studio
and we placed only one thing between them: a photo camera.
Then, we asked them,
“Talk, get to know each other, spend some hours together
and take pictures of one another, just that.”
We spent some days doing this.
A black woman, an albino woman.
A Jewish man, a Muslim woman.
A grandmother, and a punk stylist.
In short, several different types.
I confess that it was a spectacular experience,
not only for them, but also for us,
and this experience, which was almost a social experiment,
brought forth a series of wonderful photos,
some can be seen here,
but more important than the pictures themselves
were the 20 testimonies that we were able to gather from them,
from these 20 Brazilians.
A small example of how the differences among people should be valued
for the development of a society.
The TEDx staff asked me,
“Where did this idea come from?”
I’ll have to go back in time
and tell you a little bit of my personal history.
My parents are Italian.
Actually, I’m the first Brazilian in the D’Andrea family.
My parents were engaged when they arrived in Brazil, where they got married,
and I was obviously born and raised in Mooca, São Paulo.
My haircut hasn’t changed a bit, has it?
(Laughter)
The fact that I was born in this place brought me some great opportunities.
They may seem simple, but they were really great.
My childhood was very simple, of course.
I used to live in a street that was full of workers’ small houses.
We always lived close to each other,
just like every Italian who goes to live in another country.
The official language at home was Italian,
the official food was also Italian – no problem whatsoever with that.
But, when I was around four or five,
I started to play with the kids who lived in other parts of the street.
Then I made my first great discovery.
One day I observed, “Wow, not everybody is Italian!”
For me, that was way cool
because I started to learn some games which were different from the ones I knew,
to eat different things…
One of the things I most liked when I was a kid
was to go with my dad to Bom Retiro, here in São Paulo.
It just meant work to my dad – he used to visit his clients.
To me, it was pure fun.
I’d spend hours listening to my dad chatting to his clients,
mainly the jokes between them.
Of course, all his clients were Jewish.
I’d spend hours listening, and it’s funny that, at the time,
there was a Lebanese family living next to my house
and, through them, I learned to love Arabian food.
As a matter of fact, I’m crazy about it to this day.
I confess there was indeed a division between the kids in my neighborhood,
but it was about one thing only: those who were good or bad at soccer.
I’d always been bad at it, but, stubbornly,
after learning so much with the other boys
I started to play reasonably well,
and began to participate in every imaginable championship.
We’d go to places I had never been to just to play some soccer.
Marquinhos was one of the guys who most taught me about this sport.
He was older than me.
I was around 16, and he was 21, 22
and back then he gave me all the tips I know to this day.
Even now I remember what he taught me
to play soccer decently.
Once, Marquinhos went to the beach with his family
to spend the weekend,
and there at that beach, he drowned.
That was a shock for me.
I hadn’t had contact with death until then,
but the second shock came at Marquinhos’s funeral
because when I got there
I noticed I was one of the few white people at his funeral.
He was biracial, the son of a black father.
There, I began to notice that this coexistence wasn’t so simple.
Life kept teaching me more.
I got married at 23, had my first kid at 24, the second at 29.
I got divorced, married again
and, at 40, I thought I knew everything.
But then I had a daughter.
For someone who had spent his life with brothers, nephews, male cousins
and sons all my life,
in my early 40s I had this girl before me,
and then I had to learn everything again.
I relearned how to dialog, to convince
and especially, just between us, how to be convinced.
(Laughter)
I confess there were some moments in the relationship with my daughter
I had the distinct feeling of discovering parts of my brain
I didn’t even know were there.
(Laughter)
When my daughter arrived, I began to see some things
that brought some other kind of feeling.
They were basically two: first fear, then anger.
I remember well when I felt that fear for the first time.
It was when I saw this broadcast on TV
and which was all over the media at the time.
Several years ago, a young man walking down Paulista Avenue
was assaulted by a group of guys
who hit him in the face with a fluorescent light bulb,
just because he was gay.
When I saw that video
I confess I was surprised and instantly thought,
“How come?
Why does someone attack another person like that
just because they’re different?
What kind of morbid pleasure leads someone to do such a thing?”
My mind wouldn’t stop racing.
I thought, “In daylight on Paulista Avenue?
My kids walk down that place every day.
What if it was some other kind of prejudice, say, against bald people?”
I’m not sure you’ve noticed but I haven’t got that much hair.
“I’d be walking down Paulista Avenue on that same day, at the same time,
and I’d probably be assaulted by those guys
with a fluorescent light bulb to my face.
That’s it. That’s what we’re left with.”
And that started to make me angry,
mainly because every day
the media started to show more and more examples,
more and more cases of intolerance,
of stupid prejudice, of gratuitous violence,
of limitless sexism.
I felt so much anger when I saw that,
but then I came to my senses and thought,
“Anger is exactly the tool used by these biased people.
It won’t solve anything.
So I think it’s time we did something
to guide the media in a different way,
to show some more encouraging news,
at least to fight the minority that causes all this damage.”
And then I had the idea of gathering my staff
to create something that would simulate, at least for a few hours,
the experience I’d had when I was a boy.
More than photos,
they’re beautiful…
Remember, taken by 20 Brazilians…
There was no professional photographer, no Photoshop, no tricks.
Besides the photos the Brazilians took of each other,
this experiment, this exposition gave us the chance
to collect 20 truly remarkable testimonies.
Several of them contained painful stories,
but several others had stories of hope
and of good examples of coexisting with differences.
For example, Leonor, the friendliest grandmother,
who said in her testimony,
“Sonny, we’re all born the same way and we’ll all die the same way.
People sometimes forget this.”
Or the punk stylist who did the photoshoot with her
– by the way, one of the most fun sessions of all –
who said, “The subway may be crowded.
If there’s an empty seat next to me, nobody will sit there.”
Divina Raio-Laser,
the exuberant and wonderful name of the drag queen
who asks just for one thing in her testimony,
“I exist. I am here. Respect me.”
The one who did the photoshoot with her was a pacific 58-year-old family man
whose name is Nino, a little Italian man.
He said, “If there were only one type of human being,
we’d probably be extinct by now.”
Isabela, who’s a ballerina, said something I found impressive,
“People mistake attitude for personal characteristics.
Characteristics do not offend or hurt anybody;
but attitudes do.”
No doubt, from the 20 testimonies that we collected,
the one that most impressed not only me but the whole staff
was given by a Syrian woman called Rasha, who’s a Muslim
who fled from the war in her country
and has been in Brazil for less than two years.
She speaks reasonable Portuguese
and said during her testimony, “I had only seen Jewish people on TV.”
Then I said, “Did I get that right? Let me check that out.
You’re saying that, until day,
you had never seen a Jewish person in front of you?”
“Here with us was your first time, in this photographic studio?”
She said, “Yes, today was the first time.”
I couldn’t resist asking her, “How was that feeling?”
She looked at me
with a beautiful smile and said, “Normal, right?
He has different clothes and another religion
but he’s a person like me.”
I said, “You don’t need to say any more. That’s all I need to hear from you.”
This exposition was in São Paulo for two weeks.
It had great media coverage, which was exactly what we wanted,
and it’s going round some cities in our country.
Recently, it was in Curitiba for three weeks.
Something happened in Curitiba that touched me very personally.
Some schools took their students to see the exposition,
and not only did they show it to them
but they also made the students watch all the testimonies,
and later asked them to discuss and do some related work in class
about the importance of diversity in the construction of a society.
I confess that when I saw these photos,
I couldn’t help remembering a little Italian boy, long ago,
who lived and learned with kids who were totally different from him.
This exposition has brought me one great certainty:
the more we coexist with different people
the more we look similar as human beings.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheering)
“A camera does not judge, it simply photographs.”
With this simple thought
my staff and I, at Dentsu Brasil, the agency I own,
set up an exposition project called “Exposição Iguais.”
It only has one objective:
to celebrate the differences among people.
For this, we invited 20 totally different Brazilians,
20 people who’d never met or seen each other,
of different colors, from different ethnic groups,
creeds, and social classes.
We took them to a photographic studio
and we placed only one thing between them: a photo camera.
Then, we asked them,
“Talk, get to know each other, spend some hours together
and take pictures of one another, just that.”
We spent some days doing this.
A black woman, an albino woman.
A Jewish man, a Muslim woman.
A grandmother, and a punk stylist.
In short, several different types.
I confess that it was a spectacular experience,
not only for them, but also for us,
and this experience, which was almost a social experiment,
brought forth a series of wonderful photos,
some can be seen here,
but more important than the pictures themselves
were the 20 testimonies that we were able to gather from them,
from these 20 Brazilians.
A small example of how the differences among people should be valued
for the development of a society.
The TEDx staff asked me,
“Where did this idea come from?”
I’ll have to go back in time
and tell you a little bit of my personal history.
My parents are Italian.
Actually, I’m the first Brazilian in the D’Andrea family.
My parents were engaged when they arrived in Brazil, where they got married,
and I was obviously born and raised in Mooca, São Paulo.
My haircut hasn’t changed a bit, has it?
(Laughter)
The fact that I was born in this place brought me some great opportunities.
They may seem simple, but they were really great.
My childhood was very simple, of course.
I used to live in a street that was full of workers’ small houses.
We always lived close to each other,
just like every Italian who goes to live in another country.
The official language at home was Italian,
the official food was also Italian – no problem whatsoever with that.
But, when I was around four or five,
I started to play with the kids who lived in other parts of the street.
Then I made my first great discovery.
One day I observed, “Wow, not everybody is Italian!”
For me, that was way cool
because I started to learn some games which were different from the ones I knew,
to eat different things…
One of the things I most liked when I was a kid
was to go with my dad to Bom Retiro, here in São Paulo.
It just meant work to my dad – he used to visit his clients.
To me, it was pure fun.
I’d spend hours listening to my dad chatting to his clients,
mainly the jokes between them.
Of course, all his clients were Jewish.
I’d spend hours listening, and it’s funny that, at the time,
there was a Lebanese family living next to my house
and, through them, I learned to love Arabian food.
As a matter of fact, I’m crazy about it to this day.
I confess there was indeed a division between the kids in my neighborhood,
but it was about one thing only: those who were good or bad at soccer.
I’d always been bad at it, but, stubbornly,
after learning so much with the other boys
I started to play reasonably well,
and began to participate in every imaginable championship.
We’d go to places I had never been to just to play some soccer.
Marquinhos was one of the guys who most taught me about this sport.
He was older than me.
I was around 16, and he was 21, 22
and back then he gave me all the tips I know to this day.
Even now I remember what he taught me
to play soccer decently.
Once, Marquinhos went to the beach with his family
to spend the weekend,
and there at that beach, he drowned.
That was a shock for me.
I hadn’t had contact with death until then,
but the second shock came at Marquinhos’s funeral
because when I got there
I noticed I was one of the few white people at his funeral.
He was biracial, the son of a black father.
There, I began to notice that this coexistence wasn’t so simple.
Life kept teaching me more.
I got married at 23, had my first kid at 24, the second at 29.
I got divorced, married again
and, at 40, I thought I knew everything.
But then I had a daughter.
For someone who had spent his life with brothers, nephews, male cousins
and sons all my life,
in my early 40s I had this girl before me,
and then I had to learn everything again.
I relearned how to dialog, to convince
and especially, just between us, how to be convinced.
(Laughter)
I confess there were some moments in the relationship with my daughter
I had the distinct feeling of discovering parts of my brain
I didn’t even know were there.
(Laughter)
When my daughter arrived, I began to see some things
that brought some other kind of feeling.
They were basically two: first fear, then anger.
I remember well when I felt that fear for the first time.
It was when I saw this broadcast on TV
and which was all over the media at the time.
Several years ago, a young man walking down Paulista Avenue
was assaulted by a group of guys
who hit him in the face with a fluorescent light bulb,
just because he was gay.
When I saw that video
I confess I was surprised and instantly thought,
“How come?
Why does someone attack another person like that
just because they’re different?
What kind of morbid pleasure leads someone to do such a thing?”
My mind wouldn’t stop racing.
I thought, “In daylight on Paulista Avenue?
My kids walk down that place every day.
What if it was some other kind of prejudice, say, against bald people?”
I’m not sure you’ve noticed but I haven’t got that much hair.
“I’d be walking down Paulista Avenue on that same day, at the same time,
and I’d probably be assaulted by those guys
with a fluorescent light bulb to my face.
That’s it. That’s what we’re left with.”
And that started to make me angry,
mainly because every day
the media started to show more and more examples,
more and more cases of intolerance,
of stupid prejudice, of gratuitous violence,
of limitless sexism.
I felt so much anger when I saw that,
but then I came to my senses and thought,
“Anger is exactly the tool used by these biased people.
It won’t solve anything.
So I think it’s time we did something
to guide the media in a different way,
to show some more encouraging news,
at least to fight the minority that causes all this damage.”
And then I had the idea of gathering my staff
to create something that would simulate, at least for a few hours,
the experience I’d had when I was a boy.
More than photos,
they’re beautiful…
Remember, taken by 20 Brazilians…
There was no professional photographer, no Photoshop, no tricks.
Besides the photos the Brazilians took of each other,
this experiment, this exposition gave us the chance
to collect 20 truly remarkable testimonies.
Several of them contained painful stories,
but several others had stories of hope
and of good examples of coexisting with differences.
For example, Leonor, the friendliest grandmother,
who said in her testimony,
“Sonny, we’re all born the same way and we’ll all die the same way.
People sometimes forget this.”
Or the punk stylist who did the photoshoot with her
– by the way, one of the most fun sessions of all –
who said, “The subway may be crowded.
If there’s an empty seat next to me, nobody will sit there.”
Divina Raio-Laser,
the exuberant and wonderful name of the drag queen
who asks just for one thing in her testimony,
“I exist. I am here. Respect me.”
The one who did the photoshoot with her was a pacific 58-year-old family man
whose name is Nino, a little Italian man.
He said, “If there were only one type of human being,
we’d probably be extinct by now.”
Isabela, who’s a ballerina, said something I found impressive,
“People mistake attitude for personal characteristics.
Characteristics do not offend or hurt anybody;
but attitudes do.”
No doubt, from the 20 testimonies that we collected,
the one that most impressed not only me but the whole staff
was given by a Syrian woman called Rasha, who’s a Muslim
who fled from the war in her country
and has been in Brazil for less than two years.
She speaks reasonable Portuguese
and said during her testimony, “I had only seen Jewish people on TV.”
Then I said, “Did I get that right? Let me check that out.
You’re saying that, until day,
you had never seen a Jewish person in front of you?”
“Here with us was your first time, in this photographic studio?”
She said, “Yes, today was the first time.”
I couldn’t resist asking her, “How was that feeling?”
She looked at me
with a beautiful smile and said, “Normal, right?
He has different clothes and another religion
but he’s a person like me.”
I said, “You don’t need to say any more. That’s all I need to hear from you.”
This exposition was in São Paulo for two weeks.
It had great media coverage, which was exactly what we wanted,
and it’s going round some cities in our country.
Recently, it was in Curitiba for three weeks.
Something happened in Curitiba that touched me very personally.
Some schools took their students to see the exposition,
and not only did they show it to them
but they also made the students watch all the testimonies,
and later asked them to discuss and do some related work in class
about the importance of diversity in the construction of a society.
I confess that when I saw these photos,
I couldn’t help remembering a little Italian boy, long ago,
who lived and learned with kids who were totally different from him.
This exposition has brought me one great certainty:
the more we coexist with different people
the more we look similar as human beings.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheering)
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