We were a team of three. A fixer, security, and myself, an investigative photojournalist.
We would spend over three weeks travelling around Pará State in north eastern Brazil, trying to meet with people who have suffered deep trauma as a result of persecution by wealthy landowners and a corrupt state. We drove 5000 kilometres over red roads that had been dug out of pristine Primary rainforest - an infrastructure development began under the military junta in the early 1970’s.
That Primary rainforest is gone now - an area over half the size of western Europe, just one of the 26 states in Brazil - cut down for pasture. Extend that pattern to other states, and you don’t so much as go to the rainforest now, you go to its ranches and cattle farms.
We drove 5000 kilometres and all we saw were cows and storm clouds, dirty windscreens and the charred obelisk remains of Brazil Nut Trees, left uncut and exposed because of legal protection, standing alone in a field and struck by lightning. In saving them, they were condemned to death anyway.
These images were taken along the way and they represent the patina and the grind, somehow the aroma and the memory of the journey we made.
