Claudia Andujar (born 1931) is a photographer and activist born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. After living in the United States, she moved to Brazil in 1955 and began a lasting relationship with the Yanomami in 1971. Her work includes experiments with infrared photography and rephotography, as well as the numbered medical portraits of Marcados. She joined the campaign for Yanomami territorial rights in 1978 and reedited earlier photographs as Genocídio do Yanomami in 1989. Her work continues to connect photographs, drawings, and documents with accounts from Yanomami people themselves.
In conventional ethnographic photography, an outside photographer often classified Indigenous subjects and supplied the account through which they were understood. Andujar spent extended periods in Yanomami territory, experimenting with infrared film and rephotography in response to dark communal dwellings and the forest’s changing light. From 1978, she also participated in the campaign for territorial demarcation. In subsequent exhibitions, she placed the numbered portraits of Marcados and CCPY campaign records alongside Davi Kopenawa’s words and drawings by Yanomami artists, leaving interpretation open to voices beyond her own. The numbers in Marcados, initially used in a lifesaving medical effort, later acquired associations with both control and survival. From her first visit in 1971 through the 1992 demarcation and subsequent collaborative displays, the question of who uses an image, and for what purpose, has remained integral to her work.
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Contents · Table of Contents
War and Migration — Memories of Identification in Marcados
Andujar was born in Switzerland and grew up in Transylvania. During World War II, her Jewish father and many relatives on his side of the family were killed under Nazi persecution. After the war, she moved to the United States, then immigrated to Brazil in 1955. Memories of losing family members later informed her comparison between medical identification and wartime experience when presenting the numbered portraits of Marcados. *14 In Brazil she established photography as her occupation and traveled widely before an assignment for Realidade magazine took her to the Amazon. In an Aperture interview, Andujar recalled the road construction and deforestation she encountered in 1971, when the government regarded the Amazon as an “empty” territory awaiting development. *5 It was on that assignment that she first met Yanomami people, beginning a relationship that would extend over half a century. Shortly after arriving in Brazil, her limited Portuguese had made communication difficult; the camera became a way to interact with people and develop photographic work.
The Amazon Under Military Rule — Roads, Mining, and the Yanomami
Between 1964 and 1985, road building, mining, and settlement policies pursued under Brazil’s military regime reached deeper into the Amazon. For the Yanomami, outside contact brought infectious diseases and territorial incursions, intensifying struggles over their rights. *16 Disease and illegal mining threatened the foundations of community life. *18 In these circumstances, Andujar’s attention turned from any ethnographic ambition to preserve a supposedly “primitive culture” toward the changes that contact with the outside world was inflicting. Exhibitions that gather photographs alongside documents, publications, and films from the land-demarcation campaign allow her artistic work and political involvement to be followed as connected histories. *1 Research into an archive exceeding forty thousand images further establishes the work as far more than a short reporting assignment. *3 The Trans-Amazonian Highway emerged from a policy of territorial integration and economic development; for Indigenous communities, it also became a route for disease and encroachment. *16 The political dimension of Andujar’s photographs arose through her experience of living alongside the people whose environment was being transformed by construction, not simply through an activist position added after the fact. Documentation and intervention became difficult to separate. The expansion of gold mining in the late 1970s and 1980s penetrated Yanomami territory at another pace. Illegal mining affected waterways, food supplies, and movement within communities, alongside the spread of infectious disease, altering the very conditions she had been photographing. *18 Andujar continued to work within communal houses, while the consequences of roads and mining became central to CCPY’s activities and to Genocídio do Yanomami.
Yanomami Communal Houses — From Low-Light Photography to Experiments with Light
The contrast between strong outdoor light and the darkness inside Yanomami communal dwellings made conventional film photography difficult. An IMS exhibition text describes Andujar applying petroleum jelly around the lens and using infrared film. She also tested low-light exposures and rephotographed existing pictures through colored filters. *2 In photographs such as A jovem Susi Korihana thëri em um igarapé, the water’s movement and the body’s outline become inseparable from fluctuations of light. Images unlike conventional photojournalism emerged as she approached dark interiors and continually moving bodies. Her photographic methods and political involvement changed as her relationships with the communities developed. *6 A retrospective combining more than three hundred photographs with drawings by Yanomami artists, historical documents, and film reflects this multiplicity of perspectives. *7 By offering paper and drawing materials so that Yanomami people could make their own images, she moved beyond a single direction of representation, without claiming that her photographs alone could speak for their cosmology. The diffusion caused by infrared film and petroleum jelly is vulnerable to an exoticizing reading if it is treated merely as decoration signifying an Indigenous “spiritual world.” These techniques initially arose from photographing in dark communal dwellings and responding to firelight and bodily movement. *2 Andujar subsequently included Yanomami drawings in exhibitions as a way of bringing another visual account of the world into view. Her experiments with light and color also adapted photographic form to experiences that standard reportage could scarcely render in such low light. Patricia A. Bonchristiano studies light in Andujar’s work both as a photographic effect and as a material condition of the forest, taking account of Yanomami cosmology and environmental destruction through gold mining. *25 In later rephotographs, adding gold or sepia light to existing black-and-white prints also connects earlier imagery to the contemporary crisis of mining. Petroleum-jelly diffusion, infrared film, and the later gold-tinted reworkings thus span her investigations of domestic light and her reediting of images to convey the threatened forest.
The Yanomami Image, Utupë — Decentering the Photographer’s Viewpoint
Andujar’s understanding changed through her long relationship with the Yanomami. In a filmed interview, she connects what she learned from their culture from the first encounters with territorial invasion and the making of Marcados. *8 Her methods also evolved from repeated short observations as an outsider into work continually reshaped by sustained relationships and political action. *9 She altered both photographic technique and presentation as the limits of her initial understanding became clearer. IMS’s description of the work as an “ethical project” does not suggest that it achieved a settled ethical model; instead, it identifies a long undertaking in which the right to photograph, responsibility for public presentation, and the need to use images for advocacy remained in tension. *4 The campaign’s history and current Yanomami circumstances disclose the limits of judging the images solely as formal achievements. *10 Photographer and community retained different positions, even after years of contact. Shared time revealed rules and expressions the photographer initially did not understand, requiring explanations to be revised. Andujar’s repeated use of the word “learn” in her Barbican testimony acknowledges that the photographer was not the sole holder of knowledge. *8 The images developed from short-term reporting into a long-term account whose meaning changed with the relationship. Andujar also reconsidered her own role and the ways Yanomami knowledge could enter her work. Early projects presented a world seen through her camera; later exhibitions placed shamans’ accounts, drawings, and political documents beside the photographs. *7 This shift changed who could determine the knowledge required to interpret the work: Yanomami cosmology and political language appeared as material with standing alongside the photographer’s and museum’s accounts. In 2025, Ana Carolina Albuquerque de Moraes analyzed thirteen photographs through the Yanomami term utupë (“image”), examining mirror images, the “essential image” that leaves the body in dreams, and ancestral images summoned by shamans. *26 Drawing on accounts by Davi Kopenawa, Bruce Albert, and others, the study introduces interpretations extending beyond Western photography’s distinction between original and copy. In The Falling Sky, Kopenawa and Albert recount shamanic experience, dreams, encounters with outsiders, epidemics, roads, and mining from a Yanomami perspective. *27 Reading those accounts alongside photographs of the forest and the numbered portraits of Marcados opens the images to language and knowledge other than the photographer’s own.
Marcados — Two Meanings of Medical Identification Numbers
Marcados, produced around 1981–84, arose from the need for a medical team to identify individuals during vaccination and health monitoring. In MoMA’s Horizontal 1 (Village of Araçá), a sitter faces the camera with a number tag around their neck. *12 Other prints from the series were reworked as art in 2006, moving photographs initially made for medical administration into exhibition spaces. *22 Because the numbers suggested systems of external control, they carried painful associations for Andujar, whose family had suffered Nazi persecution. Yet within the medical effort, where the Portuguese naming system used for patient records was not established among the Yanomami, numbering also enabled vaccination to be tracked and lives to be protected. Her description of the series at the Barbican as “Marked to Live” points to this dual meaning. *8 The portraits hold together memories of the violence of identification and the practical necessity of healthcare. Their visual form retains the same tension. The tags are standardized and bureaucratic, but individual expressions, postures, and bodies remain distinct within the frame, resisting reduction to specimens. *12 Displayed as a series in museums, the numbers evoke different institutions: the Holocaust, police photography, and medical records. At the time of exposure, however, their purpose was to maintain continuity of treatment. Later interpretations of the signs complicate their original, lifesaving function. When Marcados reentered the art world in the 2000s, more than twenty years of political history separated the initial medical photographs from their exhibition as art. *22 Viewers may retrospectively see violent images of “numbered Indigenous people,” although the original task was to track which person had received a vaccine. In the 1980s, the tags recorded vaccination histories; in exhibitions from the 2000s onward, they also carried associations with persecution and control.
Genocídio do Yanomami — Reediting Photographs as Political Indictment
In Genocídio do Yanomami (1989), Andujar rephotographed earlier images of the Yanomami, adding overlapping color and light to reedit them as an indictment of land invasion and mass death. *13 Records made at the time of exposure became material for conveying the crisis of the late 1980s. Surviving campaign documents, medical records, and maps allow the photographic work and activism to be traced as connected histories. *20 The IMS archive preserves materials relating to the production of the images and the political activities, alongside the art itself. *19 Photographs taken within the community in the 1970s acquired new colors, sequences, and superimpositions after the incursions and deaths of the late 1980s. *13 The color and layered printing in Genocídio do Yanomami therefore embody a later editorial decision to use earlier photographs in a political indictment of territorial invasion and loss of life.
CCPY and Land Rights — The Photographer’s Role from 1978 Onward
In 1978, Andujar joined Carlo Zacquini, Bruce Albert, and others in CCPY, which campaigned for the demarcation of Yanomami territory. Alongside photography, she devoted increasing effort to securing international support. An exhibition at The Shed presents her initial encounter in 1971 and the rights campaign from 1978 as a continuous history. Her collaboration with Davi Kopenawa also contributed to the legal demarcation of Yanomami territory in 1992. *14 The movement depended on the political actions of Yanomami people themselves, alongside those of the photographer and other supporters. The Shed introduced The Falling Sky by Kopenawa and Albert, CCPY reports, and works authored by Yanomami people. *15 A related Fondation Cartier podcast features Andujar, a curator, and Kopenawa, allowing different accounts to reconsider the photographer’s archive. *23 The ongoing advocacy of Hutukara Associação Yanomami likewise emphasizes the communities’ own political agency. *17 Recent presentations at The Shed and Fondation Cartier place Kopenawa’s texts and statements and contemporary Yanomami artworks beside Andujar’s photographs. *15 Providing images for CCPY’s territorial campaign and later presenting them with Yanomami words and works diversified both their uses and the people who could speak through the exhibition.
Collaborative Yanomami Exhibitions — Multiple Voices and the Photographer’s Responsibility
Museum collections of more than one hundred works, extending from Andujar’s photographs across Brazil in the 1950s to Marcados, preserve the breadth of her activity before and after meeting the Yanomami. *11 Her long engagement connected reportage, experimental photography, medical identification, and campaigning within one body of work. A Fundación MAPFRE retrospective similarly presented more than two hundred photographs alongside Yanomami drawings, books, films, and historical documents. *21 Her images of the Yanomami and the communities’ own depictions of cosmology and politics occupied the exhibition as distinct visual languages. A 2023 New York exhibition juxtaposed Andujar’s photographs with videos and works by contemporary Yanomami artists, bringing the community’s current production into the display. *24 The extended relationship also shaped editorial decisions about whose voices should remain visible. Traditional ethnographic photography often granted the photographer and exhibiting institution almost exclusive authority to explain the subjects. Differences in power remained in Andujar’s position as an outsider, but bringing Yanomami drawings, medical material, maps, and political documents together with her photographs reduced the extent to which the pictures alone controlled interpretation. *21 The relationship changed how photographs were used and who spoke within exhibitions, carrying responsibility for who selected images and testimony. Even after many years of shared experience, Andujar retained access to outside audiences, museums, and international public opinion that the community did not hold in the same way. She employed that position to support territorial rights and exhibitions carrying Yanomami statements. *24 Displays that include CCPY documents and works by Yanomami artists offer an alternative to a history told by an outside photographer alone.
Sources — museums, archives, and specialist literature (listed individually in § SRC on this page)
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