In 1961, Life sent Parks to Brazil to shoot a story on poverty in Latin America, concentrating on the favelas, the infamous hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro. At the time, these were home to more than 700,000 people. In one favela, called Catacumba, or Catacomb, death seemed to close in from all sides. The place was riven by malnutrition and disease; open sewers ran between pitiful shacks. Despite his familiarity with poverty, Parks was shocked by the conditions: “Pockets of poverty in New York’s Harlem, on Chicago’s South Side, in Puerto Rico’s infamous El Fungito seemed pale by comparison. None of them had prepared me for . . . the favela of Catacumba” (Voices in the Mirror, 1990).

Parks was initially assigned to photograph a series of indigent fathers in the favelas—people his editors believed would best personify the wretchedness of the place. While climbing the hills to the slum, behind the glamorous Rio shoreline that tourists knew, Parks and José Gallo, his Life contact, stopped to rest beneath a jacaranda tree. There they spotted a wan, emaciated boy carrying a tin of water on his head. He stopped momentarily, keeling over with a violent cough, and then, meeting Parks’s gaze, flashed a broad and completely unexpected smile. To Parks, this boy, Flavio da Silva, embodied the brutality of poverty—and he decided to shift the focus of his story.

Flavio invited Parks and Gallo into his family’s tiny home: four walls of salvaged wood beneath a rusted tin roof where the daily battle for life was punctuated by affection, humor, and savagery. The eldest of eight children, Flavio introduced the rest of his family: father José (a kerosene salesman), mother Nair (pregnant with another child), sisters Luzia (the pretty one), Albia, Isabel, and Maria, and brothers Mario (the bad one), Baptista, and baby Zacarias.