In the early 1980s Lázaro Roberto was given a Minolta camera with a 50mm lens. By the end of the decade he had mastered the medium, establishing himself as one of the most innovative chroniclers of Black vernacular culture. From parties to protest rallies, fashion to working life; through Roberto’s eyes the world was seen in compositions which balance social drive with an empathetic sensibility and sensual tone.

Roberto’s perennial interest in hair and Afrobrasilian styling embody these twin modes of looking: in Concurso de dança e musica reggae no bairro da Ribeira, Salvador (1990); the subject’s movement is suggested in the slight blur of the image, the dancer’s white t-shirt bleaching with the white background. The viewer’s eyes are drawn to the party goer’s mass of long dreads that rise up into a whirlwind as the subject turns to the music he is evidently listening to. There’s a seriousness to the man’s face however, a slight scowl, suggesting the lyrics that are moving him are not purely escapist; a political consciousness that underpins so much of the photographer’s work, a practice born amidst Berlin’s democratic turn in 1985 and the often unacknowledged part Black activism played within that. So many of Roberto’s portraits of individuals show them in the foreground of a crowd; people with their own personalities, but who are also part of a wider community living and fighting, fighting to live. The boundary between subject and background collapses, each contextualised within the wider social landscape. This is clear again in Jovem percussionista participando da Primeira caminhada da Consciência Negra no Bairro da Liberdade, Salvador BA, in which a musician is pictured from behind, standing or moving through a crowd, his hair cropped short with wet shaved stripes that meet at the nape of the man’s neck. Yet the young percussionist’s crop is reminiscent of traditional war markings – the tiger stripes of warning – the battle made evident in a slogan sported on the back of the t-shirt he wears: REPARACAO JA.

In Rapaz com Corte de cabelo Punk Lage, Salvador - BA we see a young man stay in the barber’s chair, his afro recently cut to a flat top. The man stares straight at the lens with a keen eye, his face cast half in shadow, as if evaluating the barber’s work in the mirror. Like the work of Nigerian photographer JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Robert pays homage to the barber’s artistry, and the barber shop as a Black social place in which hair is afforded time and respect; a symbol of Black excellence and integrity. With the subject’s front-on gaze, the viewer becomes the man’s reflection, a nod that for Roberto not only were his subjects predominantly Black, so was his audience; his photography circulating in an economy which Brazil failed to value.

The Black-to-Black gaze permeates the work: the exhibition title Lente Negra is taken from the nickname Roberto has lived with for decades now; yet it also identifies the gaze from which these images are taken. Bodies and culture are pictured shorn of the interpretative, often exploitative, hierarchy that underpins so much minority white-authored and orientated documentary photography. In Portuguese one ‘takes’ (tirar) a photograph; in English the act can be even more violent, ‘capturing’ the image, but neither word seems appropriate to Roberto: for so long these images were not removed from the community in which they were created, but joined the work of other Black photographers. The Zumvi Group, the collective the photographer founded with Raimundo Monteiro and Aldemar Marquês in the mid-1990s, now features 30,000 items, including physical and digital material (photographs, documents, posters, personal objects). These images are not of Black identity but born of Black identity. In less empathetic hands, for example, the glistening, muscled Black bodies in the work from Serie estudio corpos might risk a fetishistic impetus; yet Roberto leans into the fetish and the men, their heads thrown back, chest pumped up, posing and creating their own image, embody supermen, classical heroes of Afrofuturism even. Likewise Negros, or Vendedor de temperos da feira de São Joaquim, Salvador, features a the chiselled upper body of a man, his chest and arms bedecked with multiple chains and bracelets; the upper half his face cropped from the frame. Despite his anonymity, Roberto imbues the subject with an enormous amount of agency, the jewels  a symbol of success and confidence, the image tapping into traditions of African continental studio photography. The man has fire: his wealth imploding the white-driven photographic cliche of the Black representation; the subject levering the power of the photography embodying it as much as Roberto, the man behind the camera.