'The Yanomami could disappear' - photographer Claudia Andujar on a people under threat in Brazil
Jo Griffin
@jogriffin2
Thu 25 Mar 2021 04.15 EDT
It is more than 50 years since Claudia Andujar began photographing the Yanomami, the people of the Amazon rainforest near Brazil’s border with Venezuela. Now 89, she is using her archive to increase their visibility, at a time when their survival is under renewed threat.
“The question of indigenous people should be more respected, more widely known. This is very important as it’s the only way the present [Brazilian] government will come to recognise their rights as human beings to occupy their land,” says Andujar, speaking from São Paulo. “This government isn’t interested in their rights.”
After being shown in São Paulo, Paris and, currently, Barcelona, a retrospective of her work is coming to the Barbican Centre in London in June. “I spent so many years learning about the Yanomami and this is what my archive contains. It is important to show this way of life now or these people will disappear,” says Andujar, whose campaigning helped to achieve the demarcation of Yanomami territory in 1992. In Brazil about 27,000 Yanomami people now live in 360 villages in a 9.6m hectare (37,000 sq mile) reserve, an area slightly larger than Portugal.
An exhibition of hundreds of the Swiss-born Brazilian photographer’s images now seems prescient. The show opened in Brazil in 2018, coinciding with the election of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/mar/25/brazil-yanomami-could-disappear-photographer-claudia-andujar-people-under-threat
Photos by Claudia Andujar displayed in google images:
https://tinyurl.com/2ykharr3
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