Photographer Claudia Andujar, now 92 years old, says that preserving her collection is important because it represents her life's work. Specifically regarding the custody of the images of the Yanomami, which make up most of it, she says she hopes that the indigenous people will understand that she considered them as family. "I felt like I was part of them," she says.
This feeling, says the photographer, is due to the fact that she was unable to save her father's family from death in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, during World War II. "I was the only one who survived. If I couldn't help my family, I wanted to keep fighting to see what we could do to help the Yanomami."
Between spats with the military, Andujar played an active role in the long process that led to the demarcation of Yanomami land in the early 1990s. During her decades of coexistence with the indigenous people, she composed what is perhaps the largest archive of images of these people, from the moment she decided to leave her career in journalism, in 1971, and become a mix of artist and activist.
She recorded images of life in the villages, funeral rites, and the ingestion of hallucinogens, in addition to making hundreds of portraits. She also followed the gold rush that started in the 1980s, when prospectors began irregularly entering Yanomami land, an area split between Amazonas and Roraima —from that, she created a series of photos of shop signs in Boa Vista that sold the precious metal.
The mining invasion in the Yanomami area continued in the coming decades and ended up reaching the present day — collusion with the mining was a hallmark of the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro. "He had no interest in the indigenous question," says Andujar.
Translated by Cassy Dias