João Zocatelli had never painted his face in his life.
He has land, tractors, and a farmer’s routine in Marialva, a town in the interior of Paraná, Brazil. But when his son Danilo, a visual artist, told him that he had suffered homophobic attacks and proposed a different photography project, João didn’t think twice: he let himself be made up, put on an enormous wig, and posed as a drag queen among the same furrows and tools where he had raised his family.
That’s how “Dear Father” was born, a photo series in which the father reinterprets, with mascara and high heels, the settings that shaped his son’s childhood. For Danilo, those places were tied to a model of masculinity with which he never identified — and seeing his father inhabit them in a different way changed the meaning of everything.
There was no speech or grand declaration. Just a father who, in order to defend his son, decided to put himself in his place.
