Photographing Salvador has never been just about walking through the city with a camera. Salvador is where I was born, where I grew up, and where I learned how to look at the world. Every street, every alley, every face and every gesture carries something from my childhood, from my formation, from my roots. That is why photographing this city feels different from photographing anywhere else.

In Salvador, everything seems to have meaning. The food, the dance, the faith, the body, the clothes, the colors, the way people walk, the pride of belonging. Everything speaks. Everything tells a story. And many of those stories I recognize before I even press the shutter, because they are also part of me.

African Roots was born from this encounter with my own origins. It was not created to show Afro-Brazilian culture as something distant, exotic or inferior. Quite the opposite. The purpose is to show the greatness of this culture, the strength of Black people, the beauty of African heritage in Bahia, and how much our identity owes to this presence. In Salvador, Africa is not only in books or in memory. It is in the body, in faith, in music, in work, in food, in clothing, in people’s eyes and in their hearts.

Many times, while photographing, I felt deeply moved. What first seemed like work became pleasure, encounter and recognition. At the same time, it was difficult to choose what to photograph, because everything was happening at once. A gesture, a hand, a building, a landscape, a face, an expression. Everything seemed to ask for a photograph.

One of the images that marked me the most was that of a fisherman at the fishing colony in Pituba. I had passed by that place many times in my life. I had bought fish there, seen those men working, but perhaps I had never really stopped to understand their importance. That morning, I went out very early to photograph. The day was just beginning, but that man had already gone out to sea, returned with the fish, separated what he would sell and what he would take home. He told me he had started working around two in the morning. He spoke with pride, calmness and joy.

His hands were marked by salt, sun, fish cuts, time and work. They were hard, calloused hands, but full of dignity. In that moment, I understood that the image was not only about a fisherman. It was about work, survival, food, family and continuity. It was about a Black man sustaining his own life and helping sustain the lives of many people around him, including people from middle-class neighborhoods who often pass by without truly seeing him.

Another scene that stayed with me happened in Pelourinho. I spoke for almost forty minutes with a Black woman who worked there serving tourists and locals in the historic center. She was a single mother, she studied, she worked and she fought for her own survival. She was beautiful, well dressed, wearing clothes that carried references to Afro-Bahian culture and to the memory of her grandparents and great-grandparents. There was self-esteem in her, strength and a life project.

At the same time, that scene carried a deep contradiction. A Black woman, dressed with references to her ancestry, working in the historic center of Salvador, surrounded by tourists, colonial architecture, symbols of a painful past and a culture that resists every day. She smiled, served people and kept going. But behind that smile there was struggle, motherhood, abandonment, work and dignity. This mixture of beauty and pain is also part of Bahia.

In Pelourinho, another image was born from this coexistence between faith, body and celebration. A man appeared carrying saints, between Cravinho, Olodum, music and the street. I titled the photograph Lust and Faith, because it seemed to hold something essential about Bahia. Faith and pleasure living side by side without guilt. The sacred and the body sharing the same space. A people who pray while dancing, who celebrate as a form of resistance, who transform pain into rhythm, devotion, desire and ancestry.

African Roots is, for me, a work about belonging. It is about returning to Salvador and realizing that I recognize those gestures, those bodies, those voices, those paths. It is as if each image takes me back to another time, to the streets I walked when I was younger, to the people who shaped my way of seeing, and to the city that taught me how to feel.

When I return to Salvador, I do not simply recharge my energy. I find myself again. I know where I come from. I recognize the people, the city, the strength and the beauty that shaped me. For me, Salvador is this: memory, roots, contradiction, faith, work, joy, pain, resistance and pride.