Stark images of Amazon show incredible peaks and Indigenous peoples

Photographer
Sebastião Salgado

THESE stark black and white images of the Amazon and its culture capture nature’s power and hint at the area’s precarious future. The shots are by documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado and come from his latest collection, Amazônia, which highlights the lush Amazon rainforest and the complex worlds of its Indigenous communities.

Over six years, Salgado visited a dozen different groups scattered throughout the Amazon, documenting their daily lives, ceremonies and culture.

The image below shows the Maiá river in Pico da Neblina National Park in north-western Brazil. The park overlaps with the territory of the Yanomami, whose population of some 38,000 across an area twice the size of Switzerland makes them one of the largest groups of Indigenous people in the Amazon. Above is the mountain range near the Marauiá river, another landmark in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory.

The image below shows Miró, who is a member of another Indigenous Amazonian community called the Yawanawá. He is shown making feather adornments, an art that is a quintessential part of Yawanawán culture, as well as that of some other Indigenous communities.

Salgado dedicates Amazônia to the Indigenous peoples he met and photographed in the hope that deforestation and other destructive projects in the region won’t make the book “a record of a lost world”.

Amazônia is published by Taschen on 20 May.