Amazônia Ocupada featuring the work of João Farkas (Video)
- - Hello, everybody. I'm Hortensia Calvo.
- I'm the Director of the Latin American Library.
- And I am beyond happy to welcome all of you
- to the library this evening.
- I would like to thank especially Thomas Reese, who is the Executive Director
- of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies
- and who has partially supported this event.
- And also, David Banush, the Dean of Libraries at Tulane,
- who always supports the Latin American Library.
- I also want to say a special hello to friends from the New Orleans community
- who have come and braved the parking situation at Tulane.
- So hopefully we’ll make your time worthwhile.
- It's very hard to park on campus.
- So, of course, our guests of honor. João and Fátima Farkas, Bem-vindo.
- A very warm welcome to you,
- once again, to New Orleans, and to the Latin American Library.
- And just, I just have to say that I think with João and Fátima, something they...
- they got the thing for New Orleans.
- It's something that happens to you and it happens to a lot of us
- who are from the parts of Latin America that are part of the African diaspora.
- I know because I'm from Cartagena in Colombia, and it happened to me.
- You come here and you just walk around and within minutes you feel an attraction.
- You feel an affinity to New Orleans. You feel the poetry of New Orleans.
- Not every place, believe me, has it. And I think it happened to the two of you.
- So I know it happened to the two of you.
- So I hope what this means is that we will collaborate
- in many projects in the future and that you will come
- many, many times to New Orleans and to Tulane.
- It's such an honor to present the work of João Farkas,
- one of Brazil's most renowned documentary photographers.
- João was born, alas, in São Paulo. [Chuckles] I’m kidding.
- He was born in São Paulo, but he's an adopted son of Bahia,
- a place with a lot of poetry, much like New Orleans.
- He graduated with a Licenciatura in Philosophy from the USP,
- the University of São Paulo, and also studied at the
- School of Visual Arts & the International Center of Photography in New York.
- And over the years, he has worked for the principal magazines of Brazil,
- such as Veja and Istoé, serving as photographic editor of Istoé.
- In 1986, João won the Aberge award, as well as a grant
- from the VICTA Foundation for the Amazônia Project,
- of which this exhibit is a projection, a development of.
- And since then, João has produced several major photographic series,
- including projects that document life in the coastal city of Trancoso in Bahia,
- the carnival masks of Maragojipe also in Bahia,
- and the large tropical wetland of Pantanal, which are ongoing projects.
- You can see photographs from some of these series
- in the looping images shown on the large screen in the lobby
- and as well as a documentary
- featuring João and other photographers that was being shown here
- but is now in the back on the other screen in the seminar room.
- In 2015, João launched the exhibition and book Amazônia Ocupada,
- which was exhibited first by the SESC in São Paulo
- and curated by Paolo Herkenhoff, one of Brazil's most renowned curators.
- Forty-one selections from this exhibit form
- the basis of our exhibit here of Amazônia Ocupada.
- The project documents Brazil's gold rush from the 1980s and 1990s
- that brought so many prospectors to the Amazon River Basin,
- a huge area which is about the size of the continental United States,
- not all of it in Brazil, but it is huge.
- And they went there to search for gold and to find their fortunes,
- but unfortunately wreaking havoc with local populations,
- local indigenous populations and with the natural environment.
- And I am just thrilled that we have recently acquired
- a total of 22 limited edition and signed photographs
- from the Amazônia Ocupada series by João Farkas
- to form a permanent part of our image archive
- at the Latin American Library, which will be made available
- to researchers, to students and for the classroom.
- We have a very special program tonight.
- We begin with a conversation with João led by Christopher Dunn,
- a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Africana studies here at Tulane.
- Chris’s research focuses on cultural politics
- during the period of the Brazilian dictatorship in the mid 20th century.
- He also works on popular music, race relations and Black culture in Brazil.
- He is the author of Brutality Garden:
- Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture from 2001.
- In 2016, he published Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation
- in Authoritarian Brazil, both books published
- by the University of North Carolina Press.
- And with Charles Perrone, he is coeditor of Brazilian
- Popular Music and Globalization from 2001.
- And with Idelber Avelar, he's the coeditor of Brazilian Popular Music
- and Citizenship from Duke University Press
- Chris and João will discuss the making of the photographic series
- Amazônia Ocupada, the exhibition, its historical context
- and its relevance today and many, many, many other things.
- But what we hope is that the conversation sparks questions
- from the audience about Brazil, and so we can open the dialogue to everyone.
- They will be speaking for about half an hour? 20 minutes?
- - Maybe even less. I want to make sure that we have time.
- - That everyone is included. In addition, then, to viewing João’s
- extraordinary photographs displayed on our walls
- all over the exhibit, I hope you've had time to to see some of it.
- I also hope you have time to look at our exhibit cases --
- there's one back there, and there are two in the lobby
- and the four in here -- where we tried to weave a complementary story
- to interact with the photographs that traces
- some of the most notable Western conceptions of the Amazon
- over the last 500 years through the rare books and maps
- from the Latin American Library's Special Collections.
- And in this way, we suggest a dialogue between João’s
- complex vision of the 80s and 90s gold rush
- and a broader historical context of varying and often destructive efforts
- to appropriate and master the abundant wealth of the Amazon,
- which is often called the lungs of the world.
- And it is particularly important now
- that we look at this age old story and that we are reminded
- of these incursions and their destructiveness, especially now
- when political events in Brazil are conspiring to
- erode these long fought protections of the rainforest.
- So to conclude, I have to say that this exhibition and this event
- have been the product of truly joyful and sustained collaborations.
- Over a year ago, Chris Dunn first came to me to propose this project
- and his boundless enthusiasm, his passion for everything, including caipirinhas --
- -- we have him to thank for that -- and his knowledge
- had been the driving force from the beginning.
- He and João Farkas curated the photographic portion of the exhibit
- with probably a little meddling from Chris Hernández and from me.
- The selection and description of materials
- and the narrative that we wove in the exhibit cases were the result of a
- really dynamic conversion of contributions
- by Chris Dunn, by Christine Hernández, the Curator for Special Collections
- at the Latin American Library, Rachel Stein, who is our
- Research and Instruction Librarian at the Latin American Library and for me.
- As we brainstormed and then we explored and unearthed some of the treasures
- of the Latin American Library to try to weave the story,
- I was, I have to say, I was surprised at some of the things we've found.
- It is amazing. And then, of course, Felipe Cruz. I don't know where Felipe is.
- - Right here. - He was hiding [laughter].
- Felipe Cruz... Yeah, you were hiding.
- He’s an Assistant Professor of History here at Tulane.
- And he brought his -- he is another passionate Brazilian. Or Brazilianist.
- You’re a Brazilian [chuckles]. He brought his passion
- for technology to the mix in ways that will enhance our experience.
- And given that we don't -- can you just say briefly what they can do to do this?
- He developed an app for this exhibit that we're trying out today.
- So it's a... So it’s just a little companion... Oh, sorry. So it's an app.
- It’s a companion to the content of the exhibit and allows you to kind of
- delve deeper into the work of João Farkas.
- And it's an augmented reality app and if you don't know the term,
- if compared to virtual reality, it’s just something that you look
- at the actual reality around you and adds virtual elements.
- So if you download it,
- you can look at the photos and the map from the exhibit with your cell phone
- and you get some extra buttons and virtual buttons and you click on
- you can see videos of João speaking about the photos.
- You can see some satellite imagery of the locations
- where the photos were taken, as well as the curatorial information about them.
- - So... - What's that?
- - So it's CuratAR as in augmented reality - AR.
- So curate, AR, CuratAR. CuratAR Farkas if you look.
- Unfortunately it's not available for iPhones today [sighs].
- - Yet. - Yet, yet.
- They're a little more picky about this one.
- - When is the virtual reality version going to be available?
- [Laughter]. With the goggles?
- - The virtual reality version released next year
- will allow you to walk through the Amazonia experience for yourself.
- So if you have an Android phone, you can download it.
- If not, meet your friend. We have a tablet running around.
- You can borrow my phone for a little bit if you want.
- Just look around and you see little icons floating under the photos
- and you can click on them and learn more about the work and see kind of a deeper
- dive by João explaining the photos and the context and the characters. So that's it.
- - Thank you so much for all that work. And the exhibit will be up until August.
- Yes, [applause].
- The exhibit will be up until August.
- So by that time, maybe Apple has responded and people with iPhones can use it.
- And we may have who knows, Felipe might invent something else by then.
- So I also have to say that, hands down,
- I work with the best group of people on the planet.
- I work with the people at the Latin American Library.
- And also besides Chris Hernández and Rachel Stein,
- Verónica Sánchez, Madeline White, Carol Ávila, and Sarah Kittleson
- were instrumental in getting this done. [Applause].
- Without them, this doesn't happen, trust me.
- And most especially to and grateful to João for allowing us
- to serve as a repository of his work. For that honor.
- and also for his generosity and laid-backness in allowing us to experiment
- to understand, and to kind of improvise also, as we created the exhibit cases
- to improvise on his vision of Amazônia. So thank you so much for that.
- So please join me in welcoming João Farkas
- and to the opening of the exhibit Amazônia Ocupada. [Applause].
- - Thank you, Hortensia. I wanted to add my own words of gratitude and of welcome here
- I want to start by thanking Hortensia, the Director of the Latin American Library
- who has really just done amazing things with this space. I arrived here in 1996.
- I've been here for a long time, and we had a wonderful director before, [inaudible].
- But I have to say that Hortensia has just created this space into something
- that is so welcoming and interactive and intellectually engaged.
- Those of you who know me here on campus
- know that I spend a lot of time here at the Latin American Library.
- I have a carrel here. I love my department,
- my home department in Spanish and Portuguese,
- but I actually prefer to work here in my carrel and be here.
- I spend a lot of time here and it's a very special place for me
- personally and intellectually. And so it's a great pleasure
- to be able to participate in this program here at the LAL.
- A word about Hortensia.
- We've been working very intensely on this project for the last year.
- And she is, I can tell you, very energetic,
- intellectually brilliant and also very detailed oriented.
- We have a whole category that we used
- as a shorthand, and it's called raffia questions,
- and that comes from this little ribbon, this black ribbon of raffia.
- This came out of a discussion that we had one day where she was just trying
- to decide what color of ribbon and what color of raffia we should use.
- And it was very important.
- She said that these are the little details that are very important.
- And then it became the raffia and the cachaça question
- and what to do about that.
- So these are all things that are very important to Hortensia
- and I think that has contributed to making this a very, very special event.
- I also want to thank all of the staff of LAL that worked
- so passionately with us to put this event together.
- Before going on, there's a couple of other...
- a few other shout outs, I guess you could say, or welcomes,
- special welcomes, because we have some visiting scholars
- from other universities, two of whom will be participating
- in an event tomorrow, Amazônia Ocupada Symposium.
- And for those of you who have a program, please look at the back of the program
- and you will see the schedule of events.
- We start at 10 a.m. over in Jones Hall and the Center for Latin...
- Stone Center for Latin American Studies.
- And joining us tomorrow, in addition to four faculty members here at Tulane,
- Kris Lane, Felipe Cruz, William Balee, and Sara Mellman, who's a Ph.D. student.
- We have two visitors,
- Seth Garfield,Professor of History, from the University of Texas,
- I believe, is there and in the back, and Beth Conklin of Vanderbilt
- University, an anthropologist from Vanderbilt University.
- And I hasten to add that we have a selection
- of books related to Amazônia here and their books are there.
- So if you want to consult them, they're very important
- scholars of Amazônia coming from two different
- but related disciplinary perspectives, and we're so delighted to have them here.
- So an additional lagniappe Brodwyn Fischer is here from the University of Chicago.
- She's actually unfortunately not going to be able
- to participate in the symposium, but gave a wonderful lecture last night
- on her work on race and urbanity
- and speciality, if you will, in the city of Recife.
- And so welcome and I'm so glad you're able to join us tonight.
- This is a very special night for me personally.
- I have known João and then Fatima for over 30 years.
- In fact, I was first friends with Fatima going way back.
- And I'd have to say before I talk a little bit about João, that Fatima
- -- sometimes I look at João and I think that's the world's most interesting man.
- You know, the Dos Equis commercial with all the travel.
- And I said, but Fatima is actually more interesting [Laughter].
- And she has had quite a career herself.
- When I met her, she was working in furniture design,
- and then she got into music production and concert promotion
- and then moved back to São Paulo and created all kinds of amazing
- things for the house lamps and everything back into design.
- Then became a yoga master and opened a yoga studio
- then aromatherapy and now and I can't even keep up.
- I'm only giving you half of it. And now she is creating her own line of jewelry
- based on the cultural, religious symbols of Bahia and Salvador,
- and she's wearing them right now. It's not meant as a commercial, but I did want to
- also draw attention to this amazing person right here
- Fatima Farkas, which is how I got to know João.
- And over the years, we've had tremendous conversations.
- A couple of years ago, he showed me this catalog.
- And I'm wondering, in fact, if we can pass it around and you can see
- more of the photos because we weren't able to use all of them.
- And I said, João, we should do something at Tulane and that's how this all started.
- But to start the conversation finally, I know that's a lot of prologue,
- I did want to ask you, João, about the origin. How this all came to be.
- Remember that this is -- these photos are from now
- almost 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago, right.
- And yet in an interesting kind of way so timely.
- I was wondering if you could talk about the origin, how it came about this project
- - Okay. I will avoid -- number one, excuse my English.
- I am not a native speaker,
- but I think it's better than speaking Portuguese [laughter].
- So I was working after school, I went to work in photography and
- I ended up being a photographer and an editor
- at the weekly magazine like Time magazine
- and so I worked there for four or five years.
- Very good school, very good projects.
- I came once to the Amazon forest and of course now Brazilian
- photographers working in photojournalism were very attracted by the Amazon.
- I'm sorry, people can’t see us. - Yeah you can stand up.
- - But I think it's more friendly if we stand up.
- I'm not that tall so excuse me. So the Amazon was very,
- it was always an attraction for Brazilian photographers
- because the Amazon is like more than half the country.
- And in the eighties, until the eighties, it was very difficult to get to the Amazon
- unless you lived in Manaus or in Belém or some other cities around
- the it's very scarce populated and no roads and no airplanes to go.
- So it was like living neighbor to a very interesting subject
- and not being able to reach.
- So I think that feeling it was in almost all of my colleagues.
- And so one day I got a call from [inaudible]
- which was a reporter from Istoe Magazine and very fond of the Amazon subjects.
- And he tells me, look, there is all this gold rush in the Amazon.
- So we knew and I was called by a prospector
- that actually was the president of a union of prospectors, gold prospectors,
- and he invited me to go to the Amazon with a photographer. I said, are you kidding?
- Because these guys were having the worst media possible.
- They were having like 100% negative media because they were destroying the Amazon,
- they were killing the Indians, they were destroying the rivers and so on.
- And how come they are inviting us?
- Because we actually could not reach the garimpos
- because mainly they were very far away in the middle of the jungle and you could
- only reach them through a small airplane that would land on that area.
- And the owner of the airstrip was the owner of the region.
- So you would only get in if you were allowed
- and they wouldn't allow anybody. So you could go to Serra Pelada,
- which was a very huge mine, open mine with 60, 70,000 people there,
- because there were rules going there because it was a region
- explored by [inaudible] near Carajás.
- But other than that, you couldn't go, you couldn't reach this place.
- They wanted nobody to see. But this very smart man... [inaudible]
- I don’t remember this completely. He thought he was very smart.
- He said, we have a 100% negative media.
- So if we bring someone here, maybe they have like 5% in favor of it.
- Maybe they understand why we are here and who is here and exactly what we are doing.
- He thought that maybe showing what they were doing
- could get some more of real vision and not of frequency.
- So we made an agreement with him.
- Uh, the first agreement was, of course, they would not kill us,
- which was...[laughter] even afterwards. And we didn't make any compromise.
- We didn't say that we would publish anything. We do it. We're just going there
- So they took us to maybe four or five different locations around.
- Without their support was impossible to get there.
- And with their support, it was very, very good. Very good. So we were amazed.
- We spent ten days going forth and back in the Amazon, different places,
- and I was absolutely amazed by what was going on there.
- We met all these people from all over the country
- and from different regions, from different backgrounds,
- and this craziness going after gold and roads and
- lenders and commercial and commercial mission
- people and missionaries and Indians.
- So I talked to Ricardo. We are not stopping here. Let's do the story.
- And we didn't know that it would take us ten years and a lot of effort to come back
- because the Amazon is very, very, very spread out and subject to...
- So like sometimes from Rio Branco to Belém.
- It’s easier to come back to São Paulo and then fly again to Belém
- because there is no connect flight. And so we never knew beforehand
- what we were trying to do and what we would achieve.
- And I want to stop talking because I was talking so much.
- - This is wonderful and I wanted to follow up because
- first of all, it reminds me that this documentary in Portuguese,
- it's called Olhar Amazonia or Seeing the Amazon
- that features interviews with some of the major photographers
- of the Amazon region, including João, but also includes an interview
- with Ricardo Lessa, who’s a very prominent journalist in Brazil,
- still to this day, in which he mentions that, you know,
- they were invited up there, but he told them, he said, look, we're not
- we're not going up there to do propaganda for you.
- We're going to just go without any you know, and we're going to report
- on what we see and sort of what João was was explaining.
- But then the follow up question, and this is something
- that I actually never really understood because Ricardo later on
- actually published a book, a small little book that’s in one of our
- cases out there, vitrines out there, and actually comes with a little photo
- that shows João and Ricardo circa 1990 on the trans Amazonian highway.
- And it's called Amazonia Raízes da Destruição, the roots of destruction.
- But I'm curious about the journalistic reporting that Ricardo did
- in any publications in popular magazines that would have had an influence
- on how the Brazilian public regarded the garimpo.
- I mean, was... did... I guess what I... did
- your work there have an impact at that time or is it only later
- in that you've been published, you know, in Amazônia Ocupada?
- Was there journalistic publications
- that intervened in the discussion around that at that time?
- - Yes, there were several publications, different aspects.
- Also, because the way we got there was selling
- stories, partial stories to different magazines.
- So [inaudible] São Paulo, [inaudible] Brazil,
- even Goodyear, the rubber and tire company.
- They had a beautiful magazine in Brazil and they hired us to go to Acre
- to photograph to the rubber tappers. There are some of the pictures of them here.
- So we did some specific.
- So that's how we could reach these places, even General Motors
- lent us a car, a truck so that we could do the Cuiabá-Santarém roads,
- which is very funny because it's a road that was opened in the seventies.
- So we got this car in Cuiabá in Mato Grosso,
- and the plan was to go to Santarém So we got to Cuiabá.
- We got this car from General Motors and we stopped in a
- gas station and the guy asked, Where are you going?
- We said, Oh, we are going to Santarém.
- They looked at us like, how are you going to Santarém?
- We said, Oh, we're going to take the road? He said, There is no road.
- And we said, How come? It's in the map?
- They said No, yes, it's on the map, but it's gone. [Laughter]. They built the road
- They gave the land to settlers, to people from the south.
- You can even see somewhere pictures from.. - Right there.
- - people from the south of Brazil that came not to settle, of course, but to farm
- These settlers were there and they never maintained the roads.
- So like six years -- in a month -- in a year,
- it was raining too much so we could not get out or get in.
- So it was unbelievable. And we took this road.
- We learned a lot. Like, for instance,
- you're never the last in a group of trucks because if you are in the middle,
- they cannot let you there because they cannot pass.
- So you should be out -- never be the last.
- And some other tricks that we learned. We always gave rides to people
- because if something happened, they could help and so on.
- But coming to your question, so we sold a lot of stories.
- One or two of them were very strong
- and they came out as a positive influence, like talking about the gold mining
- and some ecological problems and questions of the Indians and so on.
- But we cannot say that we changed the whole story because
- already the country had a very strong impression
- that something very bad was going on. The only thing people didn't realize
- exactly and how, and especially for us, what was very interesting,
- that's the main point of my work as you can see. It's the story of these people.
- I even say that -- I was telling to your students yesterday,
- these people were in the middle of nowhere with no cell phones,
- with no signal for TV, with no newspaper, no nothing.
- They had no news from their families, their friends had no news from them.
- So every place we came, as you can see, people were very open
- to have their pictures taken and to tell their stories.
- They wanted to convey their stories.
- They wanted to share the situation they're living.
- And which was very interesting.
- I also said that yesterday in the eighties,
- there was not such ecological ideology. It was not very widespread.
- And the question of conquering
- the Amazon was always a problem, the main problem in Brazil.
- We always felt that the Amazon wasn't really ours,
- that it could be taken by somewhere else, by another country and so on.
- If we didn't occupy the Amazon.
- And that was the feeling that comes from the 16th century, it's
- an urge for Brazil to occupy the Amazon in a way that the country doesn't lose it.
- And we never knew and it was never very easy
- because there wasn't much money to be done there.
- So that's why the country never really took possession of them.
- But this feeling was there and people were very, very proud
- of being there, being a pioneer, of being...
- This pioneer spirit was there. So these people were very proud
- of what they were doing, even if they were cutting the trees.
- Of course, nobody was proud of killing the Indians.
- But even the gold miners, they were saying, we are pioneers.
- We have conquered the Amazon.
- So, we were very careful not to judge these people.
- In general, we met very poor people coming from
- very poor situation in their background,
- especially from the Northeast and they were looking for a better life.
- They were looking for making fortune
- to give a house to their family or to feed themselves.
- So in general, the situation of these people are so...
- they were so in a suffering situation at the same time with very high spirits
- of conquering, of taking their destiny in their hands.
- So you can see most of the pictures here, very proud.
- They display very strong feeling of We are doing something.
- We are conquering. We are taking our destiny in our hands.
- So this is something that is very present in the pictures.
- - I wanted to -- you are talking about it looks like my microphone isn't working.
- So let me just borrow yours. Some of the, some of the distances
- in the maps and I just wanted to draw everybody's attention.
- We actually have a map out here that shows all of the places where João did work.
- And it's really impressive the the geographical geographical distribution.
- There's also another map that I wanted to point out.
- In one of the cases in the back, I think it's case number five
- dedicated to a magazine called Realidade, which...
- number seven. Thank you. Case number seven is in the back there,
- which is a kind of it was kind of like Time Life.
- It was noted for sort of new journalism, new investigative journalism.
- It was active between 1966 and 1976. And in 1971, Realidade did
- a big spread, a big feature on the Amazon Amazonia featuring
- a lot of photographers, including some of the photographers
- that we have in our other cases, but it also includes a map there.
- And what's very interesting is that you can see that they've already
- sort of determined the routes before they were actually built
- and actually determines the areas where they're going to do specific types
- of mining or specific types of agricultural activities.
- And a lot of this, I think it should be noted, is coming very
- specifically, very explicitly from a discourse
- created by the military regime at that time that saw the Amazon,
- they had this phrase that Amazon is a place without people
- for people without no a land, without people, for people, without land,
- which of course is totally a lie, which is totally false.
- But it was this idea that Amazon was there for development, for enrichment.
- One of the other things that we did with that case
- was went through and looked at all of the advertisements
- that were played into this narrative, and we kind of explained that there.
- But I wanted to just ask you very briefly to talk about something,
- and I want to I want to open it up to two other questions,
- because I want everybody to to have a chance to participate.
- But those of you who have the program, I'd like for you to open up
- and I think it's on page three. I'm not going to be able to read it
- because I don't have my glasses, but let me find them.
- Can you just hold that for a sec.
- Did I put them down? Yeah, here we are. Okay.
- So if you can or if you don't have a program, look on with someone.
- So I'm going to actually read the whole quote.
- This is something that João wrote in the Amazônia Ocupada book,
- and it was a quote that Hortensia and I would go back and forth, saying
- What does this really mean?
- And she would say, go call João and ask him what he means.
- And I never got around to asking you. So I’m going to ask you right now.
- And so here is what he said, “Someone once told me
- following Sartre, Beauty won't save what it shows,
- but my instincts told me the whole time that it was urgent and necessary
- to go out and photograph, to photograph all that I could, to return and return
- as often as possible, show others what my eyes had seen
- to somehow create a warning, even if for history
- to fight the terrifying sensation of irreversibility,
- of silent and unpunished crimes,
- and at the same time be capable of understanding motivations
- and giving voice to the anonymous characters of that saga.”
- I think that really encapsulates really very well the whole project.
- But I wanted to go back to that phrase “Beauty won't save what it shows.”
- And this is where we were like What does this mean?
- What does this mean? So I'm wondering if you could tell us so.
- - Well... - I finally got around to asking.
- - Well, first I want to make a parenthesis.
- There is a lady here that said that she came
- and her mother is very fond of Sebastião Salgado’s work.
- And I mention that because it's a good start to answer this question.
- Uh, Sebastião Salgado is a very important photographer
- and he happens to be from Brazil, happened to have a photograph to the
- Serra Pelada mine and beautiful pictures.
- And he’s being accused as every so successful person in general
- has many people talking against him, especially in Brazil,
- He’s being accused of making beautiful pictures out of suffering,
- out of poor people, out of migrants or so on.
- And it's a very important question for photographers.
- And because we are dealing -- photography is...
- even today I was bit of emotion
- here when I was signing the pictures that will remain here.
- I was putting the data, the day where the pictures
- were taken that were taken like 32 years ago.
- And I was getting emotional because it's a profession, it's what I do.
- I do it every day and I did it as a living to sustain my family and so on.
- It's also a passion. It's also maybe a form of art.
- But what impresses me in photography, it's... I am an old timer.
- I do appreciate much the fact that photography, it's a document.
- It's been told very much against photography today.
- People say photography, photographs lie. Photographs are fake.
- Photographs can be manipulated and so on. So it's not a document, it's fake.
- And of course you can say this about the language, the written language.
- You can say that about anything. But for me, photography have both sides.
- At the same time, it could be a form of expression and
- to reach people from the sense, from the sense side.
- But inevitably for me it's a document.
- So how do you come and photograph the forest being blunt
- without appropriating it from aesthetical point of view?
- It's always there. It's always there. So these things go together.
- So when you're doing a photograph, you could ask Sebastião Salgado,
- please do a terrible picture about this terrible situation.
- But I don't think it's the only way to look at it.
- And I think it's no harm if you do a beautiful play
- or a beautiful novel about a terrible situation.
- I mean, you don't say that about [inaudible].
- You don't say that about playwrights or...
- they deal with very difficult situations and they do poetry. They do art.
- But with photography, people somehow have this problem.
- And so I showed these pictures to a curator, and she said,
- Oh, this reminds me of this phrase of Sartre And he said,
- “Beauty doesn't say what it shows.” So it's kind of an alert
- that although we are doing our best to do some art or to
- touch the emotion of people, still the things are going to happen.
- Humankind is very strange and we have very good and very bad aspects.
- And so we can do all this beautiful piece of work.
- We can do this beautiful book, we can do this show
- and things are still going on. So that's the thing.
- - So at this point, I'd like to open it up for just a few questions.
- And we have a lot of food here and more drinks.
- And I know that people, I imagine, would be interested in that as well.
- But if we can take some questions or comments
- before we break up and return to the party.
- Unfortunately, our mobile mic does not function.
- So you can either come up here, or you can yell.
- Annie, can you project?
- - This is more of just a comment. What I'm thinking about is who [inaudible].
- - Oh it does work. Okay.
- - The Brazilian community of New Orleans is -- actually
- one of the largest groups of Brazilians in New Orleans is actually from Rondônia.
- And it’s as a result of the fact that after
- the government sponsored the opening of the Santarem highway
- and then when the World Bank put limitations on settlements
- having to be careful about environmental degradation.
- And then that the sons and daughters of those people that moved to Rondônia
- couldn't make a living anymore. And so they started
- this kind of undocumented train to the United States, New Orleans
- became one of the places where people from Rondônia actually came.
- And so in Chalmette, you have one of the largest communities
- of people from Rondônia living in the United States.
- - Wow. - I actually want to
- just mention here that Annie Gibson is probably one of the leading
- specialists of Brazilians in the United States and the leading
- specialist as an academic of Brazilians in New Orleans.
- She wrote a very fine book on this topic.
- And I also want to thank you for bringing this up, because I also want
- to give a shout out to all the Brazilians that have come out tonight.
- So thank you for coming.
- Muito Obrigado los Brasileiros que vieram esta noite. [Applause].
- Do you want to respond or do you want to keep going? Okay.
- She said, had a question. Go ahead. You can have the microphone.
- If anybody wants to come up here, too, you can share the stage.
- - I just I have to leave soon.
- So I'm sorry that I'm standing here, but I have a question kind of concerning
- politics right now and the situation in Brazil, the current situation
- about the future changes that are going to happen with the Bolsonaro politics.
- I just wanted to know how you feel about that, considering that you've seen
- the beauty of Amazon and you've seen the destruction of Amazon.
- I just wanted to understand your point of view because I've never been there.
- - Well, I have to to make a disclosure first. I'm very bad in politics, very bad.
- I have very good friends that are very good in politics.
- So I listen to them because my vision for politics is very poor.
- I trust people. I believe everything will be okay.
- I'm an optimist and I believe in beauty and I believe in the human kind.
- So I am very bad in politics. I am mistaken most of the time.
- And so what we do hope is that this new government
- is very incompetent for these questions.
- So we hope that they don't do what they planned because they don't feel very good.
- But I cannot say what the they were going to do.
- But we hope that they are very incompetent.
- - Yes. Yes.
- - Have you returned back after so many years?
- And what you saw that made you think back about things
- that have changed, the people that are left and
- after so many years, what's left there?
- - It's an interesting question. I went back in 2011
- with a friend who is also in the documentary, Eduardo Simões.
- He did a huge project in the Amazon, like one of his trips I did with him.
- Well, one main change is that the gold mining,
- it's much more professional these days.
- You have more machinery, they are bigger, they are more structured.
- It's not so much of the lonely prospector anymore. So this is a huge change.
- Other than that, it's pretty much the same. I mean, it's...
- If you fly over the Amazon, you can in many, many areas,
- you can feel that it's endless, that it will never be destroyed,
- humankind will never be able to destroy this.
- It’s so huge. It’s so immense. The size of the rivers, the distances.
- You think it's amazing. But somehow you think we can’t destroy it.
- The only problem is when you see
- the satellite photos, then you see that it's coming.
- It's coming. Layer by layer.
- It's coming from the south, from Rondônia and from the main roads.
- It's somehow it's hurting and it's bleeding.
- But still, when you when you go there, you're still amazed by the size.
- It's immense. It's immense. And I think somehow that feeling
- it's part of the reason why we are destroying the Amazon
- because it feels so immense. It feels so long, so far away, so undestroyable.
- Is that the word? It’s indestructible, that somehow
- you have this feeling, Oh, I do just a little bit harm here.
- It won't hurt, you know. So I think somehow this is
- in the background of Brazilians that we can use it, we can do it there.
- And so but the whole thing, it's almost the same.
- You don't see more of... You see much less of the religious people.
- There is much resistance for that.
- You see much less of non contact indigenous people
- and you see more of the medium sized cities and you see some more roads.
- But other than that, it's pretty much the same.
- You know, people opening small farms and so on.
- - And if you get a chance,
- if you get a chance to use the tablet and the program that Felipe used, there
- are, if you click the map icon, there are satellite photos of what
- that area that the photo was taken in looks like now.
- And you can see all the destruction and kind of the miss, the gaps in the forest.
- - Okay so question for you. The first is since your work displayed
- more of the humanity of the garimpeiros, did you feel it was criticized for showing
- a different image than what mainstream media was showing at the time?
- And the second is, did you get a chance to interact with indigenous people?
- - Good question about the garimpeiros. Well, uh, number one.
- I didn't publish this work at that time, and I didn't do a large exhibition.
- So these pictures were seen much more now than at the time.
- Uh, but what I feel is that two things. On one hand,
- people don't really look at things the way we think.
- People already have something in their minds.
- So when they look at something, they see what they want.
- It's strange. So if people didn't like garimpeiros,
- they wouldn’t think the pictures are great because they show
- enemy of nature and full body and so on. And if people had more of a human vision,
- they would see that on the pictures. I think somehow it’s the way I work.
- I don't like much this idea of artists. And so I think we give too much importance
- to art and artists everything that became so much of...
- And I think everybody has an arts... feeling it in his heart
- and eventually everybody can be, can do arts in some way.
- I don't really do a big thing about it. And
- as a photojournalist that I was for many, many years, now
- my work is literally changing more into self-expression. But,
- uh, I always consider myself
- an instrument of these people that want their pictures taken.
- I always feel that I am at service of nature, of history, of these people.
- So I think Hortensia had this experience with us the other day.
- I was, we were visiting a place and she was amazed by the fact that I took
- a picture of a man in the airport. [Inaudible]. Do you want to....
- - No, you say. - No, please.
- - Okay.
- - Because she explained so well the way I work.
- - Well, I was amazed because we went to Lakefront Airport.
- If you've never been there, you have to go there.
- It's an art deco jewel and it still works.
- And it's half empty and only in New Orleans, it's pristine.
- It was fairly recently restored, I think. And so anyway, we entered.
- The facade is beautiful and João took
- pictures and things and there was a chef walking
- in this empty kind of entry hallway and they immediately connected.
- He was such a quintessential New Orleans figure, very welcoming, a tall black man
- who just spoke beautifully, very articulate, very friendly,
- welcoming us to place, very proud that he was the chef of this place.
- And he immediately connected with João,
- and they began this kind of connection and kept talking. You kept photographing him.
- He allowed him to photograph him without a question
- as to what he was doing with the photographs.
- For all he knew, this would be plastered all over the internet.
- He just didn't know but you two established a very intimate connection.
- - Thank you. It's like I wanted her to tel it because she describes so well.
- It's more like I made him feel that he was also helping me to take his picture.
- That was, he was also doing the picture.
- So I was trained in New York City and I was young student there.
- I was taking pictures in the street
- and New York is not the easiest place to photograph.
- So I had to develop a way of intuition about
- who is open to be photographed and how to deal with unknown people.
- So I've been training this all my life and I do a lot of meditation
- and so I tried to clean my mind and to be able to to understand people and
- let them use my capacity as a photographer to help them have their pictures taken.
- So actually, I don't consider my work mine.
- Many times I've been asked to publish the series of the kind of old masks.
- And so and this again, can be used
- as a reminder or a small thing or as a token, etc..
- I said, Yes, go ahead. These pictures are not mine.
- Of course, if somebody wants to buy my pictures, I sell because
- I make a living out of that, which is quite surprising
- because when I started, you wouldn't make a living out of selling pictures.
- But so and all that to answer the lady. But anyway, that's the way I work.
- And I think if you are really open your ears, really open to people... truth comes
- And even our friend Lydia Schwartz, in the video she talks about this.
- It's very easy to to point a villain or to make a hero.
- It's very difficult to work in between because
- everybody has some of both.
- So this young boy burning the forest, he's like 11 year old boy.
- And probably his father asked him to burn the part of the forest.
- They are putting down to plant something to meet.
- So I was interviewing Brazilian television.
- They came to me and asked, Oh, please tell us who is destroying the Amazon.
- As if I could point at these people and say.
- And I got fed up of that and I said, we are destroying the Amazon,
- the Brazilians, the humankind because we keep buying the wood.
- We keep eating hamburgers, so we need more cattle to raise
- and we need more soybean and we are endless.
- We will destroy everything. We should care if we can.
- So I think this work has this characteristic
- of not judging people, but trying to contain their stories.
- - I know that there was just one more question
- about the indigenous question, and then we're going to have to wrap it up.
- She was asking you if you did any work with indigenous.
- - Oh, yes, I did connect with some Indigenous people,
- but I never lived with them. I was only telling some of the stories.
- We had this very strong story about the Yanomami Indian
- that was shot the very first time he saw a white man.
- He was in a tree and the garimpeiros came by...
- and yes, it's right there. And it was -- it's a small story
- that tells the whole story of the Yanomami Indians.
- It's in the movie in the documentary.
- I also came to the [inaudible] Indians in Rondonia, and they had reacted.
- They had killed the gold miners. They were very proud of this.
- So we went there and I stayed a few days there and I took some pictures.
- I also talk about that. And so
- somehow I got some examples of the situation of the Indians,
- but I never really belonged or stayed longer.
- And I don't speak and I'm not a specialist.
- - All right.
- Well, I think that we could, I'm sure, go on for a lot longer.
- We have a whole table of food and we have more drinks.
- And I want to also have an opportunity for people to come up and, you know,
- have private conversations or more individualized conversations with João.
- But I also want to thank everybody for coming out today.
- It was a wonderful group of people. So thank you again and thank you João.
- Of course, it was my honor and privilege to be here
- to have my pictures in the collection.
- And I really want to thank you because he worked a whole year on this exhibition.
- He is a hero. [Applause].
- Thank you and remember the exhibit is going to be up through August.
- So you have plenty of time. Take a look at the glass cases.
- There's a lot of great information there.