Over thirty years ago, projecting slides onto plastic screens and mirrors, Claudia Andujar raised awareness of the sufferings of the Yanomami people brought about by illegal gold miners.
Sean Sheehan
The Yanomami live in an Amazonian region of northern Brazil and the forest of the Orinoco River basin in southern Venezuela.
Genocídio do Yanomamia’s haunting photographs show a beleaguered community ravaged by the profit motive of outsiders and their own scarcity of natural resources. As the editors express it, they are at the mercy of “the necropolitics of governments that have normalised genocide”. An Aljazeera report in 2024 indicates a failure on the part of the Brazilian government to effectively improve their plight. President Lula promised to reverse the open exploitation that Bolsanaro had given free rein to and thousands of illegal miners were expelled but many have now returned and the indigenous people continue to suffer from malnutrition and disease.
The images, taken between 1971 and 1989, have now been re-photographed under varying levels of light and the dramatic effect is to focus attention on the stark precarity of the Yanomami.
Their dwelling places, lifestyle and shamanic culture emerge against a backdrop of forest and mountains.
Some of the images indicate a menacing and warrior-like readiness for aggression, an aspect that ethnologists and anthropologists explain with conflicting interpretations – see here – and it is said that violent deaths account for 50% of male mortality among the Yanomami.
The saturated colours and visual distortions in “Genocídio do Yanomamia” are of an experimental kind and succeed in giving a new sense of urgency to the plight of a people endangered by economic and social forces beyond their control. The overall impression, poignant and unforgettable, is one a troubling vulnerability.
Andujar photographs faces, especially female ones and children, and the extent to which some of these images have been cropped from her original work is hard to say without seeing the slides she first exhibited at the São Paulo Museum of Art in 1989. A small book of her photography for Tate Modern gives some idea of her work.
“Genocídio do Yanomamia”, by Claudia Adjujar, is published by Void and the website includes a link to a PDF presentation of the book. The images are from “Genocídio do Yanomami” © Claudia Andujar – courtesy of Galeria Vermelho and Void. More information about the publisher is available here.
“Tate Photography: Claudia Andujar”, by Tobias Ostrander, is published by Tate Publishing.
(Photos supplied by the publisher)
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