Claudia Andujar

Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1931

            The vision of artist Claudia Andujar is marked by her origin: the daughter of an evangelical mother and a Jewish father who died in a concentration camp. That perspective of looking at the world accompanied her in 1971 when she went into the Brazilian Amazon jungle with the Yanomami, an American indigenous ethnic group. "I'm not a person who goes there just to take a portrait, I like to penetrate into the thoughts of people, into people's heads", she said at an exhibition.
            Her way of capturing the images was analogous to the anthropological method: a sensitive approach to develop bonds of trust. The interest was genuine; she accompanied them in their shamanic rituals and sought to understand their culture. They believe people's souls can escape through photos and wander forever. With patience, she convinced them. Then she had to face the challenge of capturing and taking advantage of the very little light inside the maloca–a very spacious type of house.

             The leader of the Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa, said in several reports that his figure became visible thanks to Andujar's gaze that portrayed his daily life. He was one of the first of the group to understand the latent power of being photographed to defend his community.  

            Andujar is considered an activist. During the years of military dictatorship in Brazil, unable to access Yanomami lands, she did not break her commitment, although photography took a back seat. Together with a Catholic missionary Carlos Zacquini, anthropologists Bruce Albert and Beto Ricardo, and lawyers Alain Moreau and Maria Helena Pimentel, she founded the NGO Comissão Pró-Yanomami to formally defend them. One of the rights they fought for, was the recognition of their lands. Then they took up a second cause: health. With a group of volunteer doctors from São Paulo, they developed a vaccination campaign. Since the Yanomami, whom Andujar considers her relatives, do not use names, but refer to each other by their kinship (mother, father, brother, etc.), they created a classification system for the vaccination process. Each card with the person's data was accompanied by a photo. And so, without thinking about the importance that their photographic project would later have, Marcados was born.   

             Each portrait shows the intimacy they had. In some cases, she even used an entire roll of film until she found the character trait that interested her in that person. To identify each photo, each Yanomami had a sign with a number hanging around his neck. This form of identification revived her own history. In 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary, her entire paternal family was deported and killed. In the concentration camps people were tattooed with numbers to identify them: marked to die. With the Yanomami the opposite effect was intended: marked to live.