Valéria Reis is a communicator, photographer, and researcher of Black narratives in Brazil. She was born and raised in Grajaú, in the periphery of São Paulo, the youngest of six siblings and the daughter of parents from Brazil’s Northeast. She studied Communication with a focus on Advertising at ESPM—funded through a federal student loan program—and later completed an MBA in Innovation, Leadership and Management. She is the co-author of the book Lugar de Mulher é o que ela quiser (A Woman’s Place Is Wherever She Chooses), a collection of stories about female autonomy and protagonism. In 2023, she founded (se)mentes, a cultural and editorial project dedicated to mapping and documenting the trajectories of Black professionals across Brazil. Since then, she has produced three editions of the Anuário (se)mentes and recorded nearly ninety stories of people from across the country. She works independently, at the intersection of communication, memory, and representation — driven by the conviction that who gets to be remembered, and in what form, is always a political question.
Links
Profile / Research Links
Valéria’s LinkedIn
Publication Links
(Se)mentes Project (Founder, 2023)
(Se)mentes Yearbook, First Edition
(Se)mentes Yearbook, Second Edition (2024)
(Se)mentes Yearbook, Third Edition (2025)
“Lugar de Mulher é o que ela quiser” (A Woman’s Place Is Wherever She Chooses)
Summary of Research Proposal Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant: Photobooks as Acts of Permanence: Mapping the History of Black Self-Documentation in Brazil
In Brazil, the photographic archive of Black life was built in spite of institutions—not because of them. From the portrait studios of Black photographers in early 20th-century São Paulo and Salvador, to the albums circulated within Candomblé and Umbanda communities, to the publications of Black political movements in the 1970s and 1980s, there is a long history of photographic objects centered on Black identity, dignity, and collective memory. It is a history that has never been mapped in any systematic way.
This research proposes to undertake that mapping: to identify, locate, and analyze photographic objects produced by or centered on Black communities in Brazil, from the early twentieth century to the present. The concept of “photobook” here is broad and intentional; it includes studio portrait albums, terreiro records, movement publications, family albums kept in boxes, independent zines, and contemporary editorial projects. What connects these objects is not their format but their function: each one is a deliberate act of self-documentation in a country where Black people have historically been erased from official visual culture or depicted through the extractive gaze of others.
The research will be organized around one central question: what photobook traditions have Black communities developed in Brazil, and through what networks—religious, political, family-based, commercial—were these objects produced and circulated?
My practice with (se)mentes—a name that merges the Portuguese words for “seeds” and “minds” and a project built to expand the imaginary of what Black professional life looks like in Brazil—is itself part of the tradition I want to research. Since its founding in 2023, the project has produced three annual editions of the Anuário (se)mentes: a printed, photographically-driven collective portrait of Black professionals across the country. In building this object, I came face to face with a clear paradox: we were making something with historical precedents in Brazil, but those precedents were almost entirely undocumented.
The Anuário is, in its own way, an act of self-documentation in the same lineage as the studio albums, the terreiro records and the movement zines. But who made those objects? Where are they now? What did they know about the act of making them that we do not? This research is an attempt to follow that thread backwards—to find the archive that the Anuário belongs to, even if that archive has never been named.
The approach combines archival research (Instituto Moreira Salles, Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, community-held private collections), interviews with photographers, publishers, community leaders, and family custodians of photographic albums, and a survey of contemporary independent publishing. I am especially interested in objects that have never been formally archived—the family album still kept in a box at home, the ceremonial photo record held by a terreiro—and in developing ethical ways of engaging with these materials that respect the sovereignty of the communities that hold them.
A mapped history of this practice in Brazil does not yet exist. The photobook scholarship that does exist in Brazil is overwhelmingly focused on white photographers. The diasporic dimension remains a consequential gap. Brazil has the largest Black population outside Africa—its photobook history should reflect that. This grant would make it possible to begin the work of recovery and documentation that this subject merits.