“It runs, bumps, pauses, falls and moves again.” This is Diego Bomfim comparing wild water to a cinematic narrative, an analogy for his own approach to audio-visual storytelling based on his daily life. For him, narratives come with movement as he works across both photography and film.

Born in Saubara, a city located in the Recôncavo Baiano, Bomfim migrated to Salvador during his childhood. There he lived in at least 15 different neighbourhoods, all of them close to the sea, which compelled him to begin to photography the surf. Soon though, the behaviour that was on the edge of the waters caught his attention. From the hours he spent standing on the beach, the artist could contemplate all the magic he has in his own land: Bahia.

More recently he decided to move to São Paulo, the main urban centre of Brazil, in search of work. He’s since made award-winning audio-visual pieces for the advertising industry. Nevertheless, the apprenticeships, memories and synesthesia accessed by the Bahian seaside remain printed in each project Bomfim carries out, whether for commercial clients or his personal authorship.

Under the pseudonym Nixon Freire, he has work with brands such as Nike, Puma and Samsung and magazines including British BRICKS, as well as travelled the world with his work. Admirable achievements for a young Black man who is self-taught and born in a geographical space with little prospect of following paths like this. But it is the Global South, Latin America and Brazil that go through his artistic practice as "an arrow with paralysing poison," he says.

“In all my travels, I have realised that it is in the lower part of the line of the globe where I have learned to translate into image something much deeper than only aesthetics,” Bomfim says. “It is about actually reading the soul, for that is what we have here. Everyone and everything has a history, a present, a past or a future. My curiosity goes to these places to experience this and translate in all spheres of my work.”

When asked what were his ways of challenging the limitations that being in Brazil puts on his production, he answers: "When you maintain your base, belief and roots, then your limitations actually become powerful differentials." Bomfim adds that he understands himself as a local artist, shielding his own concepts and ways of doing so that, in this way, he can make any barriers something genuine in his way of doing.

Between smells, paths and mysteries, when Bomfim did something different in Salvador, he also made several artists in the city see that it is possible to travel to other places in the world by exploring their local culture in a non-literal way. From another point of view, in a re-reading often metaphorical, the power and genius of his work is in the barricade: in the action of bringing the spotlight to issues that are avoided in a positive and intrinsically poetic way.

“Today we are living a moment that is perceiving our world. A world that is sacred, profane, has identities, has entities and also great visual artists who are busy producing locally out of respect for their space and experience. Today, I believe that this spotlight that is aimed at us, although little, is the fruit of much work in the dark.”

Words Ode

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From Brazil, With Love And Optic Games is a Nataal series spearheaded by Ode, a São Paulo-based stylist, writer and independent curator. Brazil, which has the largest black population outside the African continent, is home to a new generation of young black photographers who are creating fresh perspectives on fashion and art. This series of interviews sees Ode explore how their work both expands ideas around representation and participation and challenges Western perspectives that ignore the Global South as part of black life and diasporic conversations

Read our other stories in this series here.

Published on 10/02/2021