Photographers Blog

Village of joy

Ueslei Marcelino

May 15, 2012 14:02 EDT

By Ueslei Marcelino

Deep in the Brazilian heartland, where the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin dissolve into the central plateau,  I had the opportunity last week to spend a few days in the village of joy.

What I dubbed the village of joy is the home of the Yawalapiti tribe. One day last week, a group of us were escorted into the Xingu National Park by members of the Darcy Ribeiro Foundation and the Cavaleiro de Jorge cultural center, and arrived at the circular Yawalapiti village under an enormous full moon.

The mood was one of celebration. The Yawalapiti, one of the 14 tribes living inside the Xingu National Park, were preparing a new “quarup,” a ritual held over several days to honor in death a person of great importance to them. In its original form, the quarup was a funeral ritual intended to bring the dead back to life. Today, it is a celebration of life, death and rebirth. From the very oldest to the very youngest, all the members of the Yawalapiti tribe participate in the preparations.

They wrestled, danced, fished and prepared food for the main event which will happen in August. Yawalapiti warriors held wrestling matches in a sort of qualifying round to select the best team to confront warriors from other tribes. From the inter-tribal event during the quarup will emerge the great champion.

Guardians of biodiversity

Diego Cortijo

Feb 13, 2012 13:23 EST

By Diego Cortijo

The jungle is a place too inhospitable to allow large human settlements, or that’s what we have always believed until now. New archaeological discoveries tell of highly developed cultures that have lived in the heart of the jungle. The myths of ancient cultures and places lost deep in the jungle may no longer be myths in light of these new discoveries.

With this proposal I began my second expedition to the Amazon rainforest as a member of the Spanish Geographic Society, to try to learn about and document unknown places in the jungle. Members of native communities I visited in the past had spoken to me about ancient settlements, and now I wanted to locate them.

This was a grueling expedition that began in Brazil and ended up in the Peruvian Amazon. We came across undiscovered archaeological sites that were mystical to the native communities who were their unofficial caretakers, and isolated tribes that received me as a total stranger, but always with a smile. I tried to document their traditions and legends so that they wouldn’t be lost forever with the passing of time.

But through all this, I never imagined that a simple pause in the jungle to visit our good friend Nicolas Flores would initiate a global media frenzy. The good-natured Nicolas, who is a native Matsiguenka Indian we all call by his nickname Shaco, invited us to his humble straw-roofed cabin where he lived alone. He took us downriver the second day to a neighboring community from where we could roam the area. Always in good spirits, he described how his life was so far from everything, far even from his own people.

On the second day in the community, Shaco heard a noise, as if he had been summoned. We left the hut and walked to the river’s edge, and there on the opposite bank of the great Alto Madre de Dios River was a group of natives that Nicolas immediately recognized as from the “Mashco-Piro” tribe. I had heard of their existence as an ‘uncontacted’ tribe that live totally isolated. They had been spotted only a few times by other natives of nearby communities. In fact, Shaco had experienced contact with them previously when tending to his crops on their other side of the river. The Mashco-Piro are in a delicate situation. The activities of lumber and oil companies that encroach illegally on these territories has displaced them. Shaco knew that this wasn’t the first time they had appeared on the river bank. The besiegement that they were suffering made their attitude towards strangers unpredictable.

Capturing souls

Ricardo Moraes

May 12, 2011 11:26 EDT

From the very first photograph I took of the Kayapo tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, I knew it would be a difficult nine days. They were nine days during which doctors and nurses from the humanitarian Health Expeditions carried out more than one thousand medical exams and dozens of operations on a people known for their qualities as warriors, strong and suspicious of outsiders. Few of the Kayapos understood that they were receiving aid in their benefit, for which nobody would charge them.

The field hospital was in a school annexed to the village, and on my first stroll toward their houses a mother asked for a gift in exchange for the photo I had just taken of her son. As she spoke to me in her language, translated by a man who happened to be walking past. Later I learned that even the native women who do speak Portuguese will not use that foreign tongue if their husbands are not with them.

Absolutely decided not to negotiate or “buy” their permission to photograph, I just shrugged off her demand saying that I understood. I continued on my way, only to run into her again in a short time. During the first hours there I found it impossible to recognize anyone who I had already met earlier, and suddenly I found the same woman confronting me with a “bill” for each picture I took of her, her son or any of her other children. She was aggressive and I had no resource other than to show her my ignorance of the language, even though she repeated in Portuguese, “Money, must pay.”

The Kayapos hate to be photographed after having seen so many strangers arrive, take pictures of them and their children, and then disappear without leaving any photos behind. In these terms, their anger is understandable. Even in the hospital waiting room many of the Kayapos reacted aggressively to my presence, many pointing to their palms in search of compensation for my photos.