Paraisópolis
São Paulo
Brazil, 2020

Paraisópolis does not lie on the outskirts of São Paulo, but directly beside Morumbi, one of the city’s wealthiest districts. That closeness gives inequality here an almost unbearable clarity. Densely built houses, narrow passageways, and the accumulation of daily life stand face to face with towers, gardens, swimming pools, and guarded calm.

These are not separate worlds held at a distance, but ways of living that nearly touch without ever truly meeting. Paraisópolis is therefore more than a favela: it is a place where the city reveals its own fracture lines without disguise. The photograph shows exactly that, how space is never neutral, but makes visible a social order in which proximity and exclusion exist at the same time.