With the project Fé na Festa, Brazilian photographer and traveler Samuel Macedo takes us to places where popular spirituality and traditional culture merge into a single collective and everyday act. This visual story comes to life in the heart of northeastern Brazil, among processions, indigenous rituals, maracatu, congadas, folias de reis, and Afro-Brazilian terreiro traditions.

Originally from Ceará, Macedo began observing the world through a self-built camera, crafted in his grandfather’s workshop—an inventor of wonders. His education began at the Fundação Casa Grande – Memorial do Homem Kariri, but it was by walking the margins, listening to people’s gestures and rhythms, that he learned to capture Brazil’s most poetic and ethnographic side.

Fé na Festa is a true visual and sonic investigation into the way faith manifests itself in daily life, through the bodies and rituals of communities. A celebration that is never an end in itself: it becomes resistance, identity, memory.

Figures like Mestre Agnaldo, in Pernambuco, or Mestre Nena, in Juazeiro do Norte, are living examples of how agricultural labor and festive performance intertwine into a single corporeal and spiritual language. Every dance step, every bacamarte shot, every chant is the result of a life rooted deeply in the land.

With this project, Macedo doesn’t just document—he gives back. His images become tools of exchange and awareness within communities, through exhibitions, public screenings, and accessible archives. Fé na Festa is therefore also a political act, recognizing the value of cultural and religious diversity and the importance of those who preserve it.

In recent years, Samuel has exhibited at the Centro Cultural do Cariri Sérvulo Esmeraldo with projects like Encantarias Cariri and Terra em Transe, worked for over five years with Infâncias — a project that won the Jabuti Prize — and built a massive visual archive within the Mestres Navegantes initiative. Today, with his nomination for the 2024 PIPA Prize and participation in the exhibition Bloco do Prazer at the MAR Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Macedo continues to expand his language, carrying with him more than twenty-five years of a sensitive and deeply rooted gaze.