In 2014, Magnum Photos sent four of its photographers to Brazil during the World Cup with a brief that pointed deliberately away from the stadiums, the matches, and the spectacle the rest of the world had its eyes on. What they came back with tells you more about that tournament than any official record of it ever could.

The project was called Offside Brazil, produced in collaboration with NGO Save the Dream, and the four photographers involved were Alex Majoli, David Alan Harvey, Jonas Bendiksen, and Susan Meiselas.

Between them they fanned out across São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro during the weeks of the tournament and found something that broadcast cameras and press photographers working inside the stadiums were structurally unable to see. 

A country holding two completely different experiences at the same time, often on the same street.

Majoli documented the fever in São Paulo with precision that makes you feel the noise of a packed bar in complete silence. Crowds pressed together watching screens, faces doing everything faces do when the result of a Brazil match is still uncertain.

Alongside that he was shooting the protests on the Marginal do Pinheiros highway, police in formation, a city asking out loud who exactly this tournament had been built for. Both sets of images are from the same city during the same weeks. The distance between them is not geographical.

Harvey worked Copacabana and found his own version of this. BOPE officers, the special police operations battalion, playing football on the beach during the tournament. The uniform and the ball in the same frame says something that a caption can only begin to explain.

Meiselas went deeper into the communities, spending time with girls from Cidade de Deus involved in a fashion project called Lente dos Sonhos during the same weeks the world was watching Neymar. 

Bendiksen shot everything on film, including children playing football on an elevated highway in São Paulo while the city's attention was pointed somewhere else entirely.

What the four bodies of work share is a refusal to treat Brazil as a backdrop. 

The country was the subject. The tournament was the context. Offside Brazil understood the difference and it shows in every frame.

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