The struggle of the Yanomami, through the eyes of Claudia Andujar

The story of the golden age of Brazilian reportage photography cannot be told without Realidade magazine, this precious source of long-form literary journalism covered the country’s most pressing social and cultural issues throughout the 1960s and 1970s, always with shocking portraits accompanying flowing, engaging narratives. 

The magazine went out of circulation in 1976, but the seed of its humanistic style lives on. These days, Piauí magazine bears the standard of long-form journalism in Brazil, while some of Realidade‘s photojournalists have gone on to worldwide fame. This is the case of Claudia Andujar, the 88-year-old Swiss-born Brazilian photographer who has dedicated her life’s work to the struggle of the Yanomami indigenous tribe.

Her work flourishes once again in a two-floor exhibition at Rio de Janeiro’s Moreira Salles Institute, which runs until November 10.

“The Yanomami land is the part of Brazil I know best,” she tells The Brazilian Report. Born in 1931 in Neuchatel, Switzerland, Claudia spent her childhood between Romania and Hungary, as World War II broke out. The daughter of a Jewish father, she fled to Austria with her mother to escape persecution, while the rest of her family perished at the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. 

After some years in the United States, where she studied humanities...