Books made at low tide — when the water pulls back and the territory appears.
Costa-Santos is a photobook publisher in Salvador, Brazil, devoted to the Portuguese-speaking Black Atlantic: Bahia, Cape Verde, West Africa and the diaspora. Few titles a year, small print runs, press-side supervision, every book bilingual.
Every photobook publisher in Brazil sits in the Southeast. The Northeast produces award-winning authors and has nowhere to publish them. Costa-Santos exists to fill that gap — and to make books here to the standard of the houses we admire abroad.
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Aerial photographs of the Bay of All Saints at syzygy — when sun, moon and Earth align and the low tide uncovers new geographies. The book gathers the pesqueiros: circular fishing corrals that Black fishing communities have built for generations by reading the tide. Fishing as relation, not extraction.
240 × 300 mm · 144 pp · hardcover · PT/EN · 500 copies + 40 numbered
Calunga is the sea in Bantu thought: ancestral water, the border between worlds. The house’s central collection — long-form bodies of work by authors …
At low tide the territory appears: sandbanks, fishing corrals, paths the water was hiding. This is the collection for authors who have not published a…
Barlavento is Cape Verde’s windward group of islands, and the name of the crossing. Co-editions with houses in Cape Verde, West Africa and the diaspor…
Carries the graphic lineage of the Brazilian Northeast: cheap print, sold hand to hand, made to circulate. One short essay per issue, saddle-stitched,…
Text crossing the Atlantic both ways: essays on photography, the colonial gaze and the Black image, many of them never before published in Portuguese.…
Once a year the publisher picks a first book and produces it in full. No entry fee, no financial contribution from the author.
How it works