Brazil’s Defender of the Indigenous Brings Their Fight to the Shed

"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 the 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 São 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 between 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 are still present. Andujar’s own intimate portraits of the Yanomami — a close up of a child’s face, another floating in bright blue water, the curve of a neck and a shoulder — hang from the walls."

read newstory by Jill Langlois​

Brazil’s Defender of the Indigenous Brings Their Fight to the Shed – DNyuz