Kayapó Indigenous Land - Kayapo children play behind a waterfall in the Kubenkrãnken indigenous village, in southern Pará state. The Kayapo have only been in contact with non-indigenous society since the 1960s. Their land serves as a crucial barrier to deforestation advancing from the south. © Tommaso Protti.
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Grajaú, Brazil - A deforested area in the southern Maranhao state seen from the helicopter of IBAMA, Brazil's national environmental agency. Maranhão is one of the worst affected by forest fires and illegal logging that has lost 75 per cent of it's Amazon forest cover. The Amazon Rainforest is losing a football pitch of forest cover every minute. Scientists say the Amazon is reaching a tipping point: if deforestation continues upward, the forest may never recover. © Tommaso Protti.
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Altamira, Brazil: These trees died with the opening of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam in Altamira, Pará state, which flooded 400km2 of forest. At the time of its construction, the dam was decried by environmentalists and civil society groups. Today, the project remains mired in controversy with serious questions regarding its viability and accusations of corruption during the bidding process. © Tommaso Protti.
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Araribóia, Brazil: A member of the Guajajara forest guard in a moment of of sad silence at the sight of a toppled tree cut down by suspected illegal loggers on the Araribóia indigenous reserve in Maranhão state. With deep cuts to Brazil’s environmental and indigenous protection bodies in recent years, tribespeople across the Amazon are increasingly forming vigilante groups to protect their lands against unscrupulous farmers, loggers and land grabbers. But it’s dangerous work. Indigenous activists who stand up to powerful interests in Brazil’s Amazon states are routinely threatened, persecuted and murdered. © Tommaso Protti.
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Araribóia, Brazil: Members of the Guajajara forest guard patrolling the Araribóia indigenous reserve in Maranhão state beat another indigenous man who they suspect of collaborating with illegal loggers. The guard conducts thorough patrols of their vast indigenous reserve each month, destroying loggers’ camps and seizing equipment when possible. Sometimes, they catch the loggers red handed, which can be dangerous as both groups are armed. In Maranhão and other Brazilian Amazon states, the vast majority of killings over land or resource conflict go unsolved. © Tommaso Protti.
Source:Tommaso Protti first visited the Amazon in 2014 on assignment to cover the environmental impacts of the Belo Monte Dam — a controversial project that threatened to displace 20,000 people and flood large parts of the rainforest’s indigenous land. Protti arrived with preconceptions, but what he discovered was far from the vast jungle landscapes he had imagined. Built on the Xingu River, the Belo Monte Dam sits on the outskirts of Altamira, a once-quiet Amazonian town. Due to urban development and displacement from the construction of the dam, the city’s population has tripled, and has become one of Brazil’s most violent cities.
“It was an Amazon that I didn’t know about. I found a very different social fabric than what I had in mind,” says Protti, who has been reporting from urban regions of the rainforest for the past five years. Together with journalist and “adventure companion” Sam Cowie, Protti has covered issues such as the growing number of drug gangs, the rights of indigenous communities, and the effects of deforestation.
In 2019, Protti became the laureate of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award. “The grant allowed me to think bigger, to reach more people and places I hadn’t before,” he says. The resulting reportage, captured across thousands of miles across the Brazilian Amazon — from the northeastern region of Maranhão to the states of Pará, Amazonas, and down to Rondônia in the west – goes on show at London’s Saatchi Gallery today.
Focusing on the Brazillian Amazon, which covers 60 percent of the whole rainforest, Protti covers a range of stories that show how the social, humanitarian and environmental crises overlap. “At some point, we realised that something big was at stake,” says Protti. “We felt the need to convey our experience and the variety of topics in one long-term project that could offer a new vision of the Amazon.”
Amazônia by Tommaso Protti is on show at Saatchi Gallery, London until 18 July 2021.
Read more about the project here, in an article originally published on British Journal of Photography in September 2019.
