Le prix Carmignac du photojournalisme est une initiative soutenue par la Fondation Carmignac.
The Amazon
The Report
Exhibitions
Publication
Jury
10° Edition
Deforestation in Amazonia
The 10th edition of the Award is dedicated to the Amazon and the issues surrounding the deforestation of this region. Chaired by Yolanda Kakabadse, Former Minister of the Environment of Ecuador and President of WWF from 2010 to 2017, the Award was granted to Tommaso Protti.
The Amazon is a vast region covering the territory of nine nations: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The region has a surface area of 5,500,000 km2 and is crossed by the Amazon river, the second longest river in the world and the largest by discharge volume of water. The Amazon alone accounts for half of the remaining tropical forests on the planet. It is home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity and to one in ten of the world’s species.
This territory is home to 30 million people, including 350 indigenous groups, most of whom live in their natural habitats, but the development of economic activities in the region mean that this ecosystem is under more threat than ever before.
Since 1999 at least 2,200 new species have been discovered in the Amazon biome, but with 17% of the Amazon’s surface area already destroyed, the rainforest is increasingly vulnerable.
Responsibility for the degradation and destruction of this fragile natural
environment lies with climate change, but also human activity. The consequences are multiple and both local and global: greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of biodiversity, hydrological alterations and even soil erosion.
From January to July 2019, Italian photojournalist Tommaso Protti, accompanied by British journalist Sam Cowie, travelled thousands of miles across the Brazilian Amazon to create this reportage.
I wanted to illustrate the social transformations, focusing on the veiled truth of the bloodshed and destruction that are currently taking place in the region. These diverse forms of violence are the consequences of changes in the global market, as well as of the exponential increase of global consumption, from cocaine to beef. Scientists claim the forest is reaching a point of no return because of deforestation, fuelled by illegal logging, and because of land grabbing, agricultural expansion, state and private sectors led development and resource extraction projects. I believe it is important to raise awareness of this situation and question it.
From the eastern region of Maranhão to the western region of Rondônia, through the states of Pará and Amazonas, they portrayed life in modern day Brazilian Amazon, where social and humanitarian crises overlap with the ongoing destruction of the rainforest, lungs of the planet.
The Amazon Tommaso Protti discovered is " much more than felled trees, isolated tribes and immense rivers. In the middle of the rainforest, entire towns spring up and spread out without control. They are the gateways to modernity in the region, but also the symbol of its destruction.”
The photographer makes that destruction almost physically palpable. Taking mainly night-time images in stark black and white, he highlights both the misery and despair as well as the joys and simple pleasures of the Amazonian peoples.
In Maranhão and Pará states, we met with indigenous activists from the Guajajara and Kayapó tribes fighting to protect their forested lands for future generations. Their work is dangerous: many of the tribesmen live under constant death threats as well as intimidation and harassment by local authorities tied to logging gangs and local landowners.
Sam Cowie, journalist, Sao Paulo, 2019
Interview in English with Tommaso Protti given to France 24.
Manaus, Amazonas. The Favela do Bodozal community caught fire in December 2018. Six hundred homes mostly made out of wood were damaged or destroyed in the blaze.
Amazônia, Life and Death in the Brazilian Rainforest
Authors: Stéphen Rostain, Sam Cowie, Tommaso Protti
Co-published by Reliefs / Fondation Carmignac
November 2019
144 pages
€35.00
Chaired by Yolanda Kakabadse, Minister for the Environment in Ecuador (1998-2000) and then President of WWF (2010-2017), the jury for the 10th edition of the Award was composed of:
Simon Baker, Director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP)
Clinton Cargill, Images Director of Vanity Fair
Alessia Glaviano, Director of Photography, Vogue Italia, L'Uomo Vogue, Web Editor, Vogue.it and Director of Photography, Vogue Festival
Magdalena Herrera, Director of Photography, Géo France
Kadir van Lohuizen, Photojournalist and laureate of the 9th edition
Yuri Kozyrev, Photojournalist and laureate of the 9th edition
Stéphen Rostain, Director of Research on the Archaeology of the Americas at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
