Images from
Simone Ferro and Meredith Watts
Death’s Door Dance Festival, July 2024
Door County, Wisconsin
Images from
Simone Ferro and Meredith Watts
Death’s Door Dance Festival, July 2024
Door County, Wisconsin
The neighborhood of Moema has a weekly market, like many neighborhoods in the city of São Paulo. These photos are from several visits to the market. Every week vendors of clothing, housewares, repair of kitchen pots and pans, and food stalls for nuts, spices, freshly pressed sugar cane juice, and the ubiquitous pastel shop. The pastel is a deep-fried pastry, a bit like long, flat empanada, filled with cheese, heart of palm, artichoke, or meat. They can be delicious, dragged dripping with grease from the pan. The Brazilian heart association is silent about their health value.
The São Paulo subway system is brilliantly efficient along the many lines that are completed, though many areas in the sprawling city are still underserved. A day in the underground is not exactly like being in Cocteau’s Orpheus, or in Pabst’s dystopian Metropolis, but there is still an eerie feel when you squint a bit and see it as just movement within an unforgiving structure.
The plaza, also known as the Largo da Sé, is the home of the cathedral. It is also the middle point of São Paulo and a place, they say, from which all distances are measured. It is a famous cathedral, built and rebuilt over the years, and is a popular tourist destination. What tourists experience is different from the travel posters: the plaza is filled with small vendors and diversions of all sorts. You can sell gold there, and buy a vast range of dubious goods and counterfeit items of all sorts. It is a vibrant secondary economy with money being passed surreptitiously from hand to hand everywhere. People bathe in the plaza pool. Except for the Cathedral itself, the area has been given over to all the diversity of the urban area.