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200 full-color photographs
216 pages
10-1/4 x 10-1/4"
Hardcover book with audio CD containing 20 live recordings from Rio de Janeiro
Published 2000
ISBN: 0-7892-0642-0
Stock Number: 6420
U.S. $45.00
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It's carnival time! Each February (and some years stretching into early March), Rio de Janeiro erupts in an ecstatic fiesta of pulsating music, swirling dancers, and radiant costumes. From all over the world, tens of thousands of people descend upon Rio for festivities lasting four days and four nights. Carnival is the Brazilian version of Mardi Gras, an exuberant holiday that comes before Lent, and it consumes the entire city.
In vibrant, full-color photographs, Carnival in Rio captures the unique pageantry and euphoria of Carnival, the world's largest party. While the book is a feast for the eyes, the accompanying audio CD transports you to the streets of Rio where you can hear the samba, the dance of Carnival whose rhythms African slaves brought to Brazil. Twelve live recordings and eight of the best sambas in the world are included in this outpouring of unadulterated joy. The book and CD offer an astonishing visual and audio adventure of the highest magnitude.
Carnival's main event is a parade that features a contest between escolas de samba (samba clubs). Judged for the best song, rhythm, dancing, and costumes, the competition takes place on the Sambódromo (a stadium specially designed for samba parades). Virtually every neighborhood in Rio has a samba club that practices throughout the year, harboring dreams of glory.
Throughout Carnival, many smaller, more spontaneous processions fill the streets of Rio. Anyone can jump in on the end of the many passing bandas (marching bands of brass and percussion) and share in the impulsive celebration. The nocturnal extravagance of Rio's innumerable costume balls are also recorded in this book, which will appeal to anyone interested in costumes and the singular splendor and joy of Carnival.
Author and photographer Helmut Teissl was born in Villach, Austria where he still lives, specializing in nature and landscape photography. Twenty-five years ago, on his first trip to Rio de Janeiro, he fell in love with Carnival, and since then he has witnessed and photographed Carnival twelve times.
• View 36 exciting photographs
• About the music CD
• Read an interview with the
photographer Helmut Teissl and
view Carnival photos taken since
this book was published
Carnival is all the little festivals and parades in the streets and favelas, Rio de Janeiro's poor quarters. Carnival is also masked balls, elegant and often uninhibited—even debauched, where one sees fewer masks but plenty of skin. And Carnival is a time for competitions in which countless participants pay thousands of dollars for luxurious and fantastic costumes.
But Carnival is also a time of fraternization, tolerance, and genuine human friendship.
Rio's Carnival has become internationally famous largely for the grand desfile, or review, of the top samba schools, the most colorful carnival procession in the world.
At Carnival, Rio's clocks start running on a different time.
The roots of Rio's Carnival can be found in the eighteenth-century Portuguese entertainment called the entrudo. In that festival, celebrants pelted each other with small containers of water, perfume, and sometimes even foul-smelling liquids. The first masked balls were held in 1835, and the first rhythm band, Ze Pereira, beat its drums through the streets of Rio in 1852. That sound continues to be the musical foundation for Carnival. The first carnival society was founded in 1855, and others soon followed. Because decorated floats became part of the parades then, Rio's Carnival as we know it dates back to 1855.
