French National Library Collection
In the last decade, Brazil has become an emigration destination for the African continent. It is the largest flow recorded since the colonial period when about 5 million people crossed the Atlantic and made Brazil the country with the largest black population outside of the African continent.
In this context, the Senegalese are responsible for the second largest flow, establishing communities mainly in the South and Southeast regions of Brazil. Although Senegal is not at war, it is one of the poorest countries in the world with more than half of its population illiterate and two thirds unemployed. Work is at the center of the lives of these immigrants, and it is the main factor that legitimizes migratory decisions.
Another central feature of Senegalese migration is the affective relationship with those who stayed in Africa. Financial remittances reinforce the bonds between those who left and those who stayed. Therefore, this immigration must be understood in relation to both sides; there are projects and dreams of both, it is a family movement. The affective bonds are being reconstituted in different spaces, revealing internal agreements, economic and social dynamics and relations that preserve obligations, morals and family feelings. These links are facilitated by new communication technologies.
This essay arises from my personal experience with a group of Senegalese who works in the neighborhood I live in (Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro)
Ethiopia is now Africa's fastest growing economy. A country that in the 1980s and 1990s had experienced severe famine crises due to drought and war, is witnessing the greatest transformation of its recent history, with economic growth around 10% and one of the highest rates of urbanization in the world. In addition, Ethiopia has sought peace with its longtime adversary, Eritrea; it has freed prisoners; opened access to websites and television channels that it had blocked for political reasons, and it invited banned political organizations and their leaders to return from exile.
This unprecedented and rapid change comes against a more disconcerting backdrop of unrest, placing a massive strain on established political, economic and social systems. Despite the impressive growth and modernization, Ethiopia is still one of the poorest countries in the world and full of social contrasts, where nomadic shepherds with their Kalashnikovs rifles, live only a few miles from modern neighborhoods in the capital Addis Ababa.
As a multiethnic giant with around 100 million people belonging to more than 80 ethnic groups and under a questionable democratic system, the country is at a crucial moment in which society will have to deal with complex issues such as massive rural exodus, political freedom, and ethnic tensions.
In late 2023, a new extensive study by the NationalInstitute of Space Research (INPE) found, for the first time, an arid area in Brazil with a desert ecosystem. The area is located in the north state of Bahia and is approximately the size of England. The study also indicates a massive desertification process in the region.
Brazil’s Northeast backlands (Sertão) is the world’s most densely populated drylands, with roughly 27 million people. Much of the region is turning into a desert and the consequences are water scarcity, food insecurity, forced massive migration, and loss of biodiversity.
The project Backlands proposes a visual exploration of the ongoing desertification of the Brazilian Northeast region focusing on the complex relationship between the communities and its environment, characterized by resilient individuals confronting the relentless degradation of their physical world. The goal is to better understand how the desertification of the region is changing the ecosystem, and culture, and the strategies created by the local population to mitigate its impacts.The backlands harbour a universe filled with rich imagery and experiences from a Brazil that remains largely unexplored. Beyond a narrative on environmental issues, this project seeks to craft a beautiful depiction of Brazil's deep-rooted culture and its hidden depths.
Commissioned by The New York Times Magazine
In the mountains far above the red-brick city, behind a locked gate, there is a great, green valley. Its high stone walls are streaked by waterfalls; its floor dotted with flowers and grazed by horses and cows. Six boulder-strewn miles beyond the gate, the valley ends abruptly at an enormous wall of rock and ice. Beneath it lies a stretch of calm, bright water in milky turquoise — Lake Palcacocha. Though few of its residents have ever seen this lake, the city below lives in fear of it.
On Dec. 13, 1941, a piece broke off a hanging glacier and fell into Palcacocha, creating a great wave that overwhelmed a natural dam and sent a flood surging toward Huaraz, a provincial capital in the Peruvian Andes, about 14 miles below. A third of the city was destroyed and at least 1,800 people were killed. In response, the government reinforced the natural dam and installed drainage tubes to lower the level of the lake. Huaraz boomed to 130,000 inhabitants from 20,000. Occasionally there was a scare — a rock slide into the lake in 2003 sloshed a smaller amount of water over the edge, causing panic — but to many people in Huaraz the danger began to seem remote. Until it became clear that the lake was getting bigger.
In 2009, glaciologists found that amid the widespread melting of Andean ice, the amount of water held in Palcacocha had increased by 3,400 percent over just a couple of decades. Even more worrying, this melt associated with climate change was destabilizing the glaciers hanging above it, making major avalanches more likely. The regional government declared a state of emergency and began posting guardians to watch the lake around the clock.
To continue: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/09/magazine/climate-change-peru-law.html
Kibbutz Hulata is located in the Upper Galilee area of Northern Israel, in the southern part of the Hula Valley. It was founded as a fishing villagein 1936.
Buffeted badly as their economic model proved nonviable, by the late 1970s many kibbutz had descended into economic collapse, which was followed by an unfavorable debt arrangement. Bruised and battered, the kibbutzniks had to dump their own myth of the idealistic agricultural collective. They also found themselves reaping another bitter fruit entirely of their own making: children leaving and not returning. The next generation was moving away.
The kibbutz’s had certain assets, though. The underlying idea, that man should work the land and live in brotherhood, freedom and equality, created forces that fed excellent education systems, a wealth of cultural activities and the platform for rethinking the model. In the past years, Hulata began by wooing back prodigal children, declared their effort to regain the lost generation, the kibbutz then looked outward more broadly, and began a second expansion accepting new members from the outside, most of them people that wants to work outside the kibbutz but enjoy their sense of community.
This essay is about the daily life of an Christian/Jewish family who lives in Hulata kibbutz for 2 yeras.
Comissioned by National Geographic
Commissioned by The Nature Conservancy (TNC)
Reforestation Program (Brazil)
Commissioned by UNHCR / Rede Globo Network
Brazil, a country marked by a highly contested rural landscape that has pit traditional communities—quilombolas, indigenous people, and small-scale farmers—against capital investment. Too often, the result is violence.
A research shared with Unearthed by Brazilian hyman rights NGO (CPT), shows that 37 people have been killed in the first six months of 2017 in rural land conflicts, eight more than at the same time in 2016. Most deaths were attributed to plantations or large ranches on land that has been claimed by rural communities.
In many Brazilian states, vast amounts of land have no clear owner. This ambiguity has facilitated the entrance of agribusiness, mining, and logging activity, which has surged in north-central Brazilian states. Under state control, these areas can be granted in collective or individual titles to rural communities or sold to private interests. In some cases, they are targets of land grabbing. According to data from Amnesty International, hundreds of municipalities in states like Pará, Tocantins, and Maranhão have an impunity rate of 100% when it comes to murders of agricultural laborers over the past 43 years.
Lalibela is best known for its monolithic churches, intimidating buildings carved from the red bedrock on which the city sits, joined by tunnels and still in use today by monks, priests, lay clergy, and not a few hermits. The 11 medieval churches hewn from solid, volcanic rock in the heart of Ethiopia were built on the orders of King Lalibela in the 12th century. Lalibela set out to construct a "New Jerusalem" in Africa after Muslims conquests halted Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
Even though Lalibela sits in a remote region of Ethiopia, the faithful will walk for days, even weeks, to get here, many of them traversing the rugged mountains barefoot. Amongst them, blind men and women and people with disabilities also join the pilgrimage, making their way along Lalibela's winding, hilly roads to reach the sacred site.
Ethiopia was one of the earliest nations to adopt Christianity in the first half of the fourth century, and its historical roots date to the time of the Apostles. The country only opened recently to international tourism. The political context of closure, recurrent famines, and wars impeded the emergence of any tourist activity around the different Ethiopian World Heritage sites during the 1980s and 1990s. In the past years, buses and Land Cruisers, carrying western tourists begin to arrive in Lalibela. Every year, around 40,000 international visitors travel to Lalibela to tour the site and its surroundings.
Ladakhi is a tri-border area (India, China and Pakistan) located on the inside of the Himalayan ridge, one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The only two roads that connect the region to the rest of India remain blocked by snow during 8 months a year. The isolation, the lack of resources and the adverse conditions contributed to the creation of a unique culture molded by the Buddhist philosophy and based on self-sustainability. In the 1950´s, when military tension across the border between India, China and Pakistan started to rise rapidly, things began to change. Two roads were built, one connecting the Ladakh to the southern state of Himachal Pradesh, and the other heading east, towards the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In Leh, infrastructure was built in order to attend the large contingent of troops that arrived every day, and the Capital saw the construction of gas stations, workshops and markets. In 1974, civilians were allowed inside the city, although with limited access. The development that was intensified after the 1970´s has brought to the Ladakh not only infrastructure and industrial goods but also the idealized imagery of a western culture shaped around consumption. Leh is going through a process that has been experienced by many other cultures that were isolated and eventually started to receive outside influence. If contact with these outside influences start to undermine local traditions, a culture that has thrived for centuries will be in jeopardy. Nowdays, Ladackhis are been submited to the greatest challenge they have ever faced, a challenge much more severe than isolation or harsh weather: the test of modern times.
As opposed to past beliefs, there is strong evidence that the brazilian indigenous populations are growing in the last decades. In this context and taking into consideration the interactions and assimilation processes with other cultures, the issues of the indigenous’ sense of identity are extremely delicate.
This essay is aimed to approach the issues surrounding the ethnical identity of Brazil’s remaining indigenous peoples and how the rest of the society regards them. Willing to debate ways for their permanence at the core of the Brazilian nation as an essential part of its people, several questions come up, such as: Who is the indigenous person nowadays? What defines his/her identity? Why do they take up such a romanticized and distorted place within the Brazilian society’s imagery?
The close shots portray members of a single ethnic background in their own environment and wearing day-to-day costumes, not those associated with traditional symbols and rituals. The images highlight the different phenotypic patterns among members of a same ethnicity and demystify the overwhelming idea of the traditional indigenous person as rationalized by the Brazilian society. This way, they explore the means through which changes prompted by decades of contacts with various references were incorporated into the indigenous cultures, giving their cultural identity a whole new meaning.
Over the past 10 years, I have created a mosaic of portraits, captured in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where I live. There is nothing specifically recognizable about this iconic place; rather I try to find universal imagery to capture the complexity of everyday life in an urban setting of its people. The “Tropical City” series brings the underworld and stereotypes: the corrupt governor, the police officer, the refugee, the prostitute, the zika generation, the soccer player, representations of people that I met along the years.
