Claudia Andujar, Urihi-a, 1974 [2016], Inkjet print, 90 x 134 cm
Claudia Andujar / Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil
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They survived the slave-hunting expeditions of the Spanish and Portuguese made between 1630 and 1720 that decimated other complex tribes living along the river, continuing to inhabit some 9.6 million hectares, in what has become the largest forested indigenous lands in the world.
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In 1955, Swiss photographer Claudia Andujar arrived in Brazil, unable to speak Portuguese but able to communicate with her pictures. She quickly began traveling into the interior, making contact with native groups. In 1971, she reached the Yanomami, and experience that changed her life.
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She became an advocate and an activist, using her photography to communicate with the outside world, to tell the story of the Yanomami and their challenges in the face of imperialist policies threatens to destroy their way of life. Her photographs have been collected in Tomorrow Must Not Be Like Today, just released from Kerber.
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In the book there is a curious sequence of portraits, called Maracados, where subjects were placards bearing numbers. Andujar explains, “The Yanomami do not use names. They have large families, and so everyone is referred to by their family relationship: father, mother, brother, and so on. We created health cards, and I took their pictures. We hung signs around their necks to be able to identify each of them on the health cards.”
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But there was something more, something deeper and more haunting that speaks to the photographer’s personal investment in this truth. Andujar, who was born in 1931, recounts her childhood in Transylvania, when the Nazis invaded in 1944, “No one survived from my fathers side,” she reveals. “In the camps, numbers were tattooed on their arms. These were the marcados para morrer [marked to died]. What I was trying to do with the Yanomami was to mark them to live, to survive.”
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For her efforts, the Brazilian government had her removed from the land in 1978, in order to prevent her advocating for Yanomami rights to the free world. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Yanomami’s right to their ancestral territories was recognized by the government.
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Through it all, Andujar has continued along her path, working to bring the plight of the Yanomami to the public eye. She explains her mission as one that not only protects the people, but the planet as well, a poignant issue raised during a time where climate change is proving to be a global level extinction event.
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“For at least the last 50 years, the Brazilian government, especially during the military dictatorship, has wanted to occupy the Amazonas region, cutting down trees to exploit the soil, the wood, and it is the same today. The government also discusses liberalizing mining, which would be a disaster,” she reveals.
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“My work, my photography, addresses the problem. And I certainly strongly believe that you have to maintain a balance. You cannot develop a country at all costs. The biggest problem in the Yanomami territory is currently the invasion of their land, the extraction of minerals and gold, and I am opposed to felling trees to use the land for agriculture,” Andujar adds. “I am very concerned about all of this, and I pay a lot of attention to what the Yanomami say. They say we are approaching the end of the world. My work is all about how to prevent the end of the world.”
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Godspeed.
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Claudia Andujar, Metrópole, 1974 [2016], Inkjet print, 100 x 150 cm
Claudia Andujar / Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil