Prior to pursuing photography professionally, William Rice spent the majority of his career in London’s music industry, collaborating with the likes of Björk, Prince and Sinead O’Connor. In the early 2010s, he moved back to his teenage bedroom in Northern Ireland, where he would spend the next three years looking after his parents who had both been diagnosed with terminal illnesses.

Rice subsequently quit his job in music to go travelling and bought a camera at the airport, which quickly became a new tool for expression, documentation and self-understanding. Featuring images shot between 2015 and 2022, his new photography zine O Novo Rio is the result of a series of enlightening travels to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

“I didn’t set out to make a zine about Rio, it kind of revealed itself to me over time and after several trips there,” he tells CR. “I realised I had a lot of documentary images that could potentially be put together somehow, after that I began to work more intentionally with this project in mind and creating photographs based on the people and stories I’d come across on the earlier trips.”

The long-term photo series coincided with the rule of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, which at the time was one of the world’s most proactively homophobic and transphobic right-wing governments. Despite this, Rice discovered that in queer Rio people still lived their lives regardless, and he was particularly drawn to how this community found agency and intimacy during a time of oppression.

As a hyper-politicised and hyper-religious society, spending time in Brazil reminded Rice of his own upbringing in Northern Ireland under the Thatcher government and amid The Troubles, particularly with all the dislocation that being gay in such an environment brings.

“Living as a young person under a hard-line conservative government, and operating in an extremely religious environment, was a feeling I could relate to,” he says. “That conjunction of sexuality, politics, religion and violence was like walking through the looking glass to my own past, then stepping forward to a future where nothing ever changes.”

With O Novo Rio, which translates as the New Rio, the photographer wanted to show a different side to the city than people are traditionally used to seeing. “On my first trip to Rio I found it to be multi-faceted, diverse and very real in a way at odds to what I’d been shown in media growing up in Ireland. The narrative of Rio tended to be somewhat fantastical. Photography had a fairly narrow view of the city, fashion photography especially would show very specific body types with narrow gender/racial/sexual representations, often shot in quite fetishistic ways,” he says.

“This zine is called O Novo Rio because the narratives within were new to me. I’m not claiming it to be a definitive take on a city that is not mine, but I wanted to explore some alternative stories to the ones from the images I’d seen before my first visit.” Shot in locations including the iconic Ipanema Beach, nature reserves south of the city, the historic downtown, various favelas, and one of the biggest queer clubs in South America, the photographs explore themes ranging from religion and resistance to escapism.

As an outsider documenting another culture, from an ethical standpoint it was important to Rice that he only worked with Rio-based creatives both in front of and behind the camera. “When I travel, I am a visitor in someone else’s house and I strive to show the respect that any visitor should. I aim to shoot upwards, to lift and empower anyone I’m making a portrait with, to allow everyone to feel complete agency over their own presentation,” he says.

“I spent a lot of time photographing queer folks and their spaces. Coming from this community myself helped with my own understanding of some of the shared aspects of our lives and also fostered a conscious sense of responsible representation. I’m always considering the question: ‘How is this person or place coming across in this photograph?’”

O Novo Rio by William Rice is available in store at Dover Street Market; @williamricestudio