1/29/2023

BRAZIL'S -SPECIAL- BRACKET : MASTER PRECIS HONOURS

 


Sao Paulo, Brazil : A defender of Brazil's Indigenous community : Claudia Andujar's focus on the Yanomami people continues in her 90s.

Every night at 7 p.m., Claudia Andujar, the renowned photographer, sits down at her desk, puts on her headphones and turns on her computer.

She has a standing Skype date with Carlo Zacquini, a missionary she met almost 50 years ago, when she first started her groundbreaking work with the Yanomami people of the Brazilian Amazon.

The two, along with anthropologist Bruce Albert, worked for decades to help the Indigenous group, some 38,000 strong, protect their land, spending extended periods of time in their villages before coming back to the same apartment she lives in now, overlooking Sao Paulo's famous Avenida Paulista.

There, in 1978, the trio sat at the light table next to the wall-to-wall windows in Andujar's stark white living room and made a plan.

Strewn with negatives for her upcoming photo books, it became the homebase for their work with the Yanomami that, 14 years later, would lead to the demarcation of the Indigenous territory, on the border with Venezuela and Brazil, and its official protection under federal law.

NOW, as the setting sun casts the last light of the day through those same windows, the room no longer plays host to the hustle and bustle it once did, but remnants of that chaotic past and still present.

Andujar's own intimate portrait of the Yanomami - a close-up of a child's face, another child floating in bright blue water, the curve of  a neck and a shoulder - hang from the walls.

Some of the Yanomami and other Indigenous art she has been given over the years - a clay and wooden sculpture, woven baskets, earrings and bracelets made of beads, seeds, flowers and stones - are encased in glass.

Others are displayed on shelves among a collection of books that represent a lifetime of work in photography and activism in the Amazon.

The World Students Society thanks author Jill Langlois.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Grace A Comment!