One day I bumped into a gardener who surprisingly told me that football fanaticism has little to do with the choice of sports related symbols on gravestones. This caught my attention and soon after, I met Salete, a woman who had opted to put the Santos logo on her beloved Mauro's gravestone. Santos is the team of the great Pelé and more recently, Neymar. They have many supporters in Brazil and, as I expected, Salete suggested that Mauro was really a Santos fanatic. However, as I kept talking to her, her discourse began to unveil a different story.

“Mauro was a kind person and a hard worker. I met him in a nightclub for elderly people and we loved each other so much from the very beginning. We liked to listen to music and go to karaoke bars. His biggest passion was music and he could talk about any musician! He used to go very often to Santos since he had an ill brother there, but he didn't like to go to the stadium, nor watch any games and he never had any Santos jerseys. When he died, I turned to his sister and asked her which team he supported. His family didn t want to do it but I thought he would have liked it and would have done the same for me.” For my last question, I insisted: "Why did you choose the Santos symbol for his gravestone?” and she replied: “Because he was a fanatic…”

When you see these gravestones, the image easily leads you to wonder about the person's life based on the stereotyped ideas we have of Brazilians. However, just as somebody wrote on the walls of the entrance to the cemetery, we should “look beyond” in order to understand the meaning of things. I would take it further by saying that this is an excellent example of the limitations of documentary photography because without accompanying text, these pictures would simply misrepresent the significance behind the gravestones.